The Primer has been written for those who are new to VBA programming and the Excel object model. It introduces the VBA language and the features of the language that are common to all VBA applications. It explains the relationship between collections, objects, properties, methods, and events and shows how to relate these concepts to Excel through its object model. It also shows how to use the Visual Basic Editor and its multitude of tools, including how to obtain help.

The middle section of the book takes the key objects in Excel and shows, through many practical examples, how to go about working with those objects. The techniques presented have been developed through the exchange of ideas of many talented Excel VBA programmers over many years and show the best way to gain access to workbooks, worksheets, charts, ranges, and so on. The emphasis is on efficiency—that is, how to write code that is readable and easy to maintain and that runs at maximum speed. In addition, the chapters devoted to accessing external databases detail techniques for accessing data in a range of formats.

The final four chapters of the book address the following advanced issues: linking Excel to the Internet, writing code for international compatibility, programming the Visual Basic Editor, and how to use the functions in the Win32 API (Windows 32-bit Application Programming Interface).