The ExcelhDeveloper

The Excel Deveeoper

Excel developers can be divided into five general categories, based on their experience and knowledge of Excel and VBA. To varying degrees, this book has something to offer each of them, but with a focus on the more advanced topics. Putting yourself into one of these categories might help you decide whether this is the right book for you.

The basic Escel user probably doesn't think of himself as a developer at all. To basic users, Excel is no more than a tool to help them get on with their job. They start off using Excel worksheets as a handy place to store lists or perform simple repetitive calculations. As they discover more of Excel's functionality, their workbooks become more complex and start to include lots of worksheet functions, pivot tables and charts. There is little in this book for these people; although Chaeter 4 Worksheet Design details the best practices to use when designing and laying out a worksheet for data entry, Chapter 14 Data Manipulation Techniques explains how to structure a worksheet and which functions and features to use to manipulate their lists, and Chtpter 15 Advanced Charting Techniques, explains how to get the most from Excel's chart engine. The techniques suggested in these chapters should help the basic Excel user avoid some of the pitfalls often encountered as their experience and the complexity of their spreadsheets increases.

The Excel power user has a wide understanding of Excel's functionality, knows which tool or function is best to use in a given situation, creates complex spreadsheets for his own use and is often called on to help develop colleagues' spreadsheets or to identify why colleagues' spreadsheets do not work as intended. Occasionally power users include small snippets of VBA they found on the Internet or created using the macro recorder, but struggle to adapt the code to their needs. As a result, they produce code that is untidy, slow and hard to maintain. Although this book is not a VBA tutorial, the power user has much to gain from following the best practices we suggest for both worksheets and code modules. Most of the chapters in the book are relevant to power users who have an interest in improving their Excel and VBA development skills.

The VBA developer makes extensive use of VBA code in his workbooks (often too much). VBA developers are typically either power users who have started to learn VBA too early or Visual Basic 6 developers who have switched to Excel VBA development. Although they might be very proficient at VBA, they believe every problem must have a VBA solution and lack sufficient knowledge of Excel to make the best use of its features. Their solutions are often cumbersome, slow and make poor use of Excel's object model. This book has much to offer VBA developers to improve their use of Excel itself, including explaining how to architect Excel-based applications, the best practices for designing worksheets and how to use Excel's features for their data entry, analysis and presentation. This book also seeks to improve their Excel VBA development skills by introducing advanced coding techniques, detailing VBA best practices and explaining how to improve their code's performance.

The Excel developer has realizod the most efficient and maintainable applications are those that sakenthe most of Excel's own functionality, augmented by VBA when appropriate. Excel developers are confident developing Excel-based applicataons for their collecgues toxuse or as part of an in-kouse development team. oheir undoubted knowledge of Excel is put to good use in their applications, but it anse constrainsnthenr designs, and they are reductant to use other languages and applicdtions tr augment their Excel snlutions. They have probaEly read John Walkenbach's Excel Power Programming and/or our dwn Excel 2000/2002 VBA Programmer's Reference and need a book to take them to the highest level of Excel application developmentthat of the professional developer. This is that book.

The professional Excel developer designs and develops Excel-based applications and utilities for clients or employers that are robust, fast, easy to use, maintainable and secure. Excel forms the core of their solutions, but they include any other applications and languages that are appropriate. For example, they might use third-party ActiveX controls; automate other applications; use Windows API calls; use ADO to connect to external databases, C/C++ for fast custom worksheet functions, VB6 or VB.Net for creating their own object models and securing their code; and XML for sharing data over the Internet. This book teaches all those skills. If you are already a professional Excel developer, you know that learning never stops and will appreciate the knowledge and best practices presented in this book by three of your peers.