Can you reccomend me a good Excel 2007 Book?

May 5, 2010 8:52 AM

Can you reccomend me a good Excel 2007 Book? I'm currently studying a foundation degree in Renwable Energy in the UK, and am struggling with Excel 2007. A general book would be handy, but the main topic I'm really struggling with is 'visual basic', so it would need to include detailed information on how to use that and the coding system of Excel. Can anyone reccomend a good book to get that would include information relative to that?
posted by sockpim to Computers & Internet (9 answers total)

Are you sure Excel is the right tool for the job? What are you trying to achieve?

Visual Basic is just another programming language. You could write code against Excel 2007 in pretty much any language that runs on the Microsoft CLR as I understand things. All the real programmers are going to tell you to use C# though; Visual Basic has a fairly bad reputation.
posted by pharm at 9:04 AM on May 5, 2010

Response by poster: Fair enough, I'm willing to accept that visual basic isn't the greatest method, but it's part of my course, so I have to be able to use visual basic. the specifics would be that I'm trying to get the hang of wiring my own functions in visual basic.
posted by sockpim at 9:15 AM on May 5, 2010

Response by poster: writing*
posted by sockpim at 9:24 AM on May 5, 2010

If I understand the situation correctly, you're looking for Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) which is actually a subset (or a slight variant?) of Visual Basic.

I wish I knew of a good book on VBA, but I learned what I need to know in VBA by recording macros, and then playing around with the resulting code.
posted by SuperSquirrel at 9:29 AM on May 5, 2010

Fair enough if it's part of your course. Just be aware that there are other (better) options out there if you want to write anything on any kind of scale in the future.

As SS says, you're probably being exposed to VBA in Excel. I'm afraid I don't have any good references for you, although you might get somewhere by starting with the wikipedia page on VBA & following the links from there.
posted by pharm at 9:39 AM on May 5, 2010

O'Rilley press has a pretty good reputation in the programming community, you might want to check this out.
posted by phyrewerx at 9:54 AM on May 5, 2010

"Analyzing Business Data with Excel" by O'Rilley is also excellent. About 2/3 of it is material on advanced techniques in Excel proper, and 1/3 is Visual Basic techniques.

Combine that with phyrewerx's recommendation, O'Rilley's "Writing Excel Macros with VBA," and you'll be off to a good start.

If you give us more details on what you're trying to achieve, how much experience you have with programming, and how much effort you're willing to invest to develop your programming skills, we will be able to help you more.
posted by gmarceau at 10:21 AM on May 5, 2010 [1 favorite]

John Walkenbach is one of the experts in Excel. Here are his books. He's pretty friendly, too. You can email him to ask questions about the books or if you give him information about your course details, he can recommend a specific book or course of study for you.
posted by CathyG at 11:14 AM on May 5, 2010 [1 favorite]

Oh sorry. I didn't realize that link went to Amazon. Here is John's webpage.
posted by CathyG at 11:17 AM on May 5, 2010 [1 favorite]