Writing Word Macros: An Introduction to Programming Word using VBA 2nd Edition

Although the book was written quite a while ago, the principles and most of the details still apply to Word Macro writing. I found the book thorough, with sufficient detail to let me learn and write new code. You would, of course, need another text for the features of the newer versions of Office (2007 and 2010).Recognizing the innate limitations, I give it a strong recommendation.

This is good book for someone new to VBA programing. The book title says "Word Macros" but you can use the concepts in other Office programs. There is an macro file you can get from the publishing company that gives examples used in some of the chapters of the book.

I have noticed that certain number of commentators did not give this book high mark. I wonder why?First of all let me introduce myself. I have been electronic engineer, system engineer and a programmer for the last 20 years. I follow this MS Word thing from about its first versions up to now. You do not want to hear how many languages I have or I have had in my pocket. My first steps in Visual Basic for Applications has been so old that I do not remember when exactly I have been involved in the matter. Most of my knowledge of VBA and with lots of other fields started with no books at all.The author Mr. Roman says very clearly that Word macros scheme is so large that his intention is not to cover all, or even most of these objects, but to acquaint the audience with the major portions of it in order to EASE LEARNING. I also would like to point out that the editor's note on Amazon also brilliantly says: "Not intended to be an encyclopedia of Word programming". And finally who would expect that some topic with more than 3,000 properties and methods could be just put in a book with less then 400 pages altogether?From these reasons I consider the book is properly advertised and the marks given to the book should only judge about what the book promise and what it delivers. And it delivers a lot.What I personally needed was a book on Word objects and here it is. Longer than decade I needed a book on Word macros, and this author seems to be the only one who dares to go for adventure of giving an insight into this topic. I think he did the most he could; otherwise he would need 5 years more to write the encyclopedia, and we should not like that, should we?For this discussion it is important that generally the Microsoft company has made a very hard life to programmers, with version inconsistency, with peculiar solutions, abandoning standardizations and trying to enforce just private rules, with monopoly and with a lot of other problems that I do not want to enumerate in this letter. In spite of that, this author did the best job of bringing the controversial Word macros topic much closer to the broad public that he deserves applause. For that I give him 4 stars.

This book presents a number of examples that can be used in Word and the best part is that they are easy to understand and they WORK!

Not easy to find a book that writes clearly on this subject.Very well orgamized and easy to follow.I would have appreciated more examples, however.

Do NOT buy this book. It is useless.

Very clearly written

Everyone who buys a book has a different expectation of what it should do for him, I can understand why some reviewers are dissatisfied with this book. I have done years of programming and am really late to the Word VBA game. I found this book to be quite helpful.It is funny that every book on VBA has a sizable section on the language itself, explaining what a variable is and how to construct a do loop, etc. Most readers find this stuff useless (to them) and consider it padding at best. I wish future writers will take a bold step and not bother with "toilet training", and instead go into the application aspect of VBA in a big way.This book is not a learning book; if you don't know anything about programming, this book is not the place to start. (Try Guy Hart-Davis's book for this) Instead, it is a reasonably good reference. I like the author's writing style and demeanor. He did not go into detail on many subjects, but for those that he did, he explained things really well, and took care to elaborate on some of the subtleties. After chewing on a few of these, I feel that I really got my money's worth as they would save me from hours of frustration.Unlike Excel VBA, which is far more popular, and there is no shortage of books on it. This book on Word VBA was published in 1999, and since then there have been practically no new books on the subject that is better. Better? What do I mean? If the author were to work on a new edition, I would suggest the following: 1) Get rid of the portion on language and IDE, 2) Redo the many long list of "enums" so that they contain only the more frequently used ones and explain what the constants really do and 3) Construct a few more substantial examples on how to do practical work on Word documents.