Skip to Content
Programming Excel with VBA and .NET
book

Programming Excel with VBA and .NET

by Jeff Webb, Steve Saunders
April 2006
Beginner
1114 pages
98h 16m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from Programming Excel with VBA and .NET

Preface

I was lucky enough to be at Microsoft when Visual Basic was added to Excel. I had just wrapped up working on OLE Automation—the technology used to make Excel objects programmable—and I remember that meetings with the Excel group were, at times, difficult. Why should a premier Microsoft product like Excel put so much effort into adding a low-profit item like Visual Basic when it already had a macro language?

“Because BillG said so” takes you only so far, even at Microsoft. The facts are that programmability doesn’t sell products the way some other whizbang feature might, it adds risk to delivering the product bug-free and on time, and (we found out) it poses a security hazard.

What programmability does do is make your product a platform for others. Today, Excel is the foundation for probably millions of small spreadsheet-based software solutions and is used by certainly thousands of very large and sophisticated applications. That sells products.

It also makes the skill of programming Excel extremely valuable. The community of Excel programmers is large, knowledgeable, and (I hope) well paid.

Become 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,
and much more.

Read now

Unlock full access

More than 5,000 organizations count on O’Reilly

AirBnbBlueOriginElectronic ArtsHomeDepotNasdaqRakutenTata Consultancy Services

QuotationMarkO’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.
Head of Cybersecurity
QuotationMarkI 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.
Field Engineer
QuotationMarkI’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.
Amir M.
Data Platform Tech Lead
QuotationMarkI'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.
Mark W.
Embedded Software Engineer

You might also like

Excel 2013 Power Programming with VBA

Excel 2013 Power Programming with VBA

John Walkenbach
Excel 2016 Power Programming with VBA

Excel 2016 Power Programming with VBA

Michael Alexander, Richard Kusleika
Excel 2016 VBA and Macros

Excel 2016 VBA and Macros

Bill Jelen, Tracy Syrstad

Publisher Resources

ISBN: 0596007663Errata Page