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Integrating Excel and Access
vBulletin Book Store > vBulletin books beginning with I
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Integrating Excel and Access |
Author: Michael Schmalz
Published: 2005-11-01 |
List price: $39.95
Our price: $26.37
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Usually ships in 24 hours
As of: October 14th, 2008 01:58:02 AM
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Customer comments on this selection.
 Virtually Useless
I bought this book because I was in a crunch and needed some quick help in getting a model I was building in Excel for a client to talk to the large dataset stored in Access (to run queries through VBA from the Excel platform, etc). It turns out that there's very little about using Excel as the front end and Access as the back end - the author favors using Access up front (including to do some seemingly random and senseless things as update an Excel model through a code you have to execute in Access, for some reason).
Beyond this flaw, my general impression of the book is a bunch of random snippets of code that were useful at some point to the author and which he reproduces with no attempt to actually explain the workings of the code. He then threw this in with a bunch of other stuff that you don't need a book to tell you how to do (import data from Access to Excel, import data to Access, etc.). There was little thought and quality put into this book - it shouldn't have been published.
 Needed Coverage of a Specific Topical Area
"Integrating Excel and Access" covers the topic spelled out in the book's title...the integration of Microsoft Excel and Microsoft Access. While this may appear to be a niche topical area, I found such integration to be important, especially when working with large and complex data sets using non-enterprise class tools.
The book does a good job covering the important area of the object models...for both Excel and Access. Utilizing and referencing object models across these two applications can prove to be a critical task when automating the integration of Access and Excel.
I used this book for the specific purpose of automating Excel from Access and vice-versa...thus my focus on object models. As such, I did not focus a great deal on the rest of the book's content.
This is the best reference I have come across related to the automation of Microsoft Excel from Microsoft Access and vice versa.
A wordy collection of Excel code
The title of this book is misleading. 70% of the book covers Excel and how to make Excel integrate into other platforms and applications. At 190 pages, that means the author spends about 60 pages covering Access (and that's only to cover intuitive tasks accomplished through the user interface). The examples are mostly Excel VBA code; none of which are particularly new or mind blowing.
The strangest part of this book is the author inexplicably puts a half-hearted Excel object model in an Appendix. But no object model for Access? Can anyone say filler? Seems a shame to waste such an interesting topic on this extremely wordy collection of Excel code. The positive: this book is thin enough to fit perfectly under my wobbly desk.
 Hodgepodge of topics
This book contains a hodgepodge of topics loosely fitting in with Access and Excel. Unfortunately, the title is misleading. You would expect an entire book on automating data movement between Excel and Access (BOTH from AND to), but you don't entirely get that. The XML stuff and integration with other applications is interesting but not necessarily relevant. There's also a great discussion of Excel's R1C1 (relative address) and A1 (absolute address) style notation.
Let's go through the chapters:
1. Intro
2. Using Excel's Uset Interface
3. Data Access from Excel VBA (using Excel to pull data in)
4. Integration from the Access Interface which covers exporting data to Excel.
5. Using Access VBA to Automate Excel (about pushing/exporting a spreadsheet from Access to an Excel window using Access VBA)
6. Using Excel Charts and Pivot Tables with Access Data
7. Leveraging SQL Server Data with Microsoft Office... part of this talks about how Excel can AVOID Access (the opposite of what the book is supposed to be about!)
8. Advanced Excel Reporting Techinques... bad title, good topic. This is about using Access VBA to create reports in an Excel spreadsheet.
9. Using Access and Excel Data in Other Applications (OTHER??? applications. Now we are looking at OTHER applications like Word, Powerpoint, and MapPoint. Interesting, but way off topic.)
10. Creating Form Functinality in Excel (another chapter about Excel, not integration)
11. Builing Graphical User Interfaces (an unnecessary Access tutorial)
12. Tackling an Integration Project (general discussion)
Then there's an appendix about Excel('s) Object Model and VBA Basics.
So out of all of the above, all it has to say about importing Excel data into Access is many pages showing how to use the import wizard which is pretty intuitive anyway but doesn't say much about pulling Excel data into Access using VBA. What about getting DoCmd.TransferSpreadsheet to work as smart as manually using the Access import wizard?
 What about Controlling Access from Excel
I'd actually rate this 3.75 *'s, but that's not available. I find this excellent in the material it does cover, namely "controlling," if you will, Access from Excel. There simply are an insufficient number of books and documents covering the details of Microsoft automation, which was supposed to be one of hallmarks of using MS Office. However, I found nothing in the text going the other way - controlling Excel from Access. This is an inexcusable ommission, in my opinion. The book should be retitled so it's true content is clear.
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