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Although this book was not requested by ACCU I was really happy to see it featured on the book list. More times than I care to remember I have tried to write Excel Macros, with some success, but I have never really felt confident about the subject. The help text (normally pretty good for most subjects) seems to be lacking in the area of writing macros and any books for Excel seem to relegate the subject to an appendix, preferring to concentrate on how to copy cells and other subjects that most people know how to do anyway.

To get a book dedicated to this single subject is a godsend to anybody who wishes to develop his or her skills in this area. Fortunately, the book does the subject justice and after describing the VB development environment and programming language, the Excel object model is discussed. This is a revelation in itself as suddenly you find you can control Excel from other applications (okay, we know it was possible but did you know how?).

By this stage of the book the hard work is done. The remainder of the book discusses how to apply VB and the Object Model to write what are in effect programs for Excel (I think they are more than macros which, by my definition, are recordings of key strokes).

If you want to learn how to write Excel macros, I would recommend this book and it is good to see a computer book of this quality priced at under twenty pounds.