April 2006
Beginner
1114 pages
98h 16m
English
Content preview from Programming Excel with VBA and .NETBecome an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
Why Program?
Excel is a mature product with every imaginable feature—doesn’t it do everything it needs to already? Excel is amazingly complete, but programming Excel isn’t really about adding new features as much as it is about combining existing features to solve specific problems.
Excel is a platform for solving complex calculations and presenting results. Programming transforms that general platform into a task-specific piece of software. The phrase task-specific piece of software is kind of a mouthful, and most folks use the word solution instead. In my opinion, that’s awfully vague but probably better than a new acronym.
The reason to program Excel is to make some task easier or more reliable. Programming languages make things easier because they are great at performing repetitive operations and following a logical path without getting tired or bored. They make things more reliable because they slavishly follow your directions and never, ever get creative.
Having such a devoted servant comes with a lot of responsibility, however. For instance, if you tell Excel to “lather, rinse, repeat” like it says on the back of a shampoo bottle, it’s liable to scrub the hair right off your head since you never told it when to stop repeating. (Hint: if that ever happens to you, press Ctrl-Break and step out of the shower.)
You need to understand the basic rules common to all programming languages before you can write real programs in Excel (see Chapter 2). That’s kind of dry stuff, though, so ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
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I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.