Featured Book – “Microsoft Office 2000 Visual Basic for Applications Fundamentals” by David Boctor

Lots of folks contact our company for recommendations on how to quickly get up to speed with Microsoft Office’s programming language Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) and how to become facile with Office’s rich but often arcane object models. Our standard answer is: (1) read the help documentation for whatever application you’ll be coding in the most (that’s free); (2) buy a copy of David Boctor’s book; and (3) code, code, and code some more.

Boctor covers all the relevant material, and does it in an easy-to-follow style. He includes plenty of practice files that are nicely coordinated in the text. His practice and sample source code isn’t “cast off” code, it’s the good stuff; focused on the task at hand, well written, and well documented. The book is divided into six key sections: Learning VBA, Managing Documents and Files and Manipulating Document Content, Working Across Applications, Working with Active Window Content, Customizing the User Interface, and Developing COM Add-Ins for Office. This 527- page tome is a must-have for the bookshelf of any Office developer at any level.