Why Excel Is Great for Developers

Excel is a highly programmable product, and it's easily the best choice for developing spreadsheet-based applications.

For developers, Excel's key features include the following:

• File structure: The multisheet orientation makes it easy to organize an application's elements and store them in a single file. For example, a single workbook file can hold any number of worksheets and chart sheets. UserForms and VBA modules are stored with a workbook but are invisible to the end user .

• Visual Basic for Applications: This macro language lets you create structured programs directly in Excel. This book focuses on using VBA, which, as you'll discover, is extremely powerful and relatively easy to learn.

• Easy access to controls: Excel makes it very easy to add controls such as buttons, list boxes, and option buttons to a worksheet. Implementing these controls often requires little or no macro programming.

• Custom dialog boxes: You can easily create professional-looking dialog boxes by creating UserForms.

• Custom worksheet functions: With VBA, you can create custom worksheet functions to simplify formulas and calculations.

• Customizable user interface: Developers have lots of control over the user interface. In previous versions, this involved creating custom menus and toolbars . In Excel 2007, it involves modifying the Ribbon. Changing the Excel 2007 interface is not as easy as it was in previous versions, but it's still possible.

• Customizable shortcut menus: Using VBA, you can customize the right-click, contextsensitive shortcut menus.

• Powerful data analysis options: Excel's PivotTable feature makes it easy to summarize large amounts of data with very little effort.

• Microsoft Query: You can access important data directly from the spreadsheet environment. Data sources include standard database file formats, text files, and Web pages.

• Data Access Objects (DAO) and ActiveX Data Objects (ADO): These features make it easy to work with external databases by using VBA.

• Extensive protection options: Your applications can be kept confidential and protected from changes by casual users.

• Ability to create "compiled" add-ins: With a single command, you can create XLA add-in files that add new features to Excel.

• Support for automation: With VBA, you can control other applications that support automation. For example, your VBA macro can generate a report in Microsoft Word.

• Ability to create Web pages: It's easy to create a HyperText Markup Language (HTML) document from an Excel workbook. The HTML is very bloated, but it's readable by Web browsers.