As macro writing becomes more and more like regular programming, learning to use an editor and program development environment becomes more important. Nice use is made here of the VB Editor with emphasis on the Object Browser and the Immediate window - preparing the reader for perhaps moving on to more sophisticated development environments such as Visual Studio, which of course is not covered in this book. (Programming Office applications is included in the latest Visual Studio beta.)

It is a joy to find a book that teaches macros with VBA in a way that permits easily moving on to more general software development with VB. The early Office macro languages were well removed from "real" programming; but VBA has changed that. OK, so perhaps it is softball and not baseball. This is a great book to give to an administrative Microsoft Office workaholic who is restless for more knowledge and might just become a self-taught developer.

This book has a 2001 copyright; but as I write in July 2003 I still cannot find a better first book for VBA with Excel for non-programmers.

On July 24, 2003, I want to add that there are two speed bumps in the book where the content is decidedly more difficult than the balance of the book. The first, midway through the book, is a chapter on manipulating Pivot Tables; and the second is an overly-fancy final chapter with lots of Pivot Table and graphics content. Both of these chapters are useful; but the level of difficulty seems two steps up from the other chapters. Perhaps these two chapters prompted some of the negative comments by others. You can safely skip these two (of twelve) chapters if you wish.