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Recently as part of my job I have had to edit and create a lot of excel spreadsheets. I am familiar with some Excel formulas but while editing the spreadsheets I don't feel that I'm using the full potential of excel.

Are there any books/online resources which guide someone with a programming background in Excel?

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I think there are two necessary step towards achieving your goal.

  1. Learn VBA (obviously)
  2. Understand Excel's object model. This MSDN article, Automating Applications Using the Office Object Model might be a start.

Also, record some macros and examine them afterwards (Alt + F11). It helped me a lot when I tried to understand the VBA code that such macros produced.

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Excellent answer. VBA and the object model are core to taking full advantage of Excel. – Troggy♦ Jan 15 '10 at 8:28
Since you have previous programming knowledge, picking up VBA and the object-oriented methods are probably going to be easy. Out of probably 500 financial analysts at my company, I am the most knowledgeable on Excel. It was easy as I was a CS major for 2 years. – Stephen Jan 16 '10 at 5:21
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+1 for mentioning recording and vieweing macros. – Bratch Apr 22 '10 at 14:35
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This guy has some wicked examples (datamining, simulation, AI) of programming in excel without VBA:

http://people.revoledu.com/kardi/index.html

Iteration with no VBA!

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up vote 1 down vote

Look up the VBScript stuff for Excel on the MSDN site.

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1+ I consider myself a good vba and excel programmer, and I had never used VBScript with excel, thanx for the pointer – Krazy_Kaos Oct 15 '10 at 1:35
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up vote 1 down vote

I learnt Excel VBA Programming thanks to this book. I absolutely recommend it:

Microsoft Excel VBA Programming for the Absolute Beginner / Duane Birnbaum

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up vote 0 down vote

I recommend the books written by John Walkenbach. Since you're already comfortable with Excel and programming, then I'd look at: Excel 2007 Power Programming with VBA (or its 2003 equivalent). His "Excel Bible" might be of interest, depending on how in-depth your knowledge of Excel is.

Also, the Excel-L programming list is an excellent resource when you have specific questions:

http://www.lsoft.com/scripts/wl.exe?SL1=EXCEL-L&H=PEACH.EASE.LSOFT.COM

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up vote 0 down vote

Right here on SuperUser and over at StackOverflow, especially with respect to coding.

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For extra help, sure. But I think he meant more an online tutorial, to not ask about anything each time. – Gnoupi Jan 15 '10 at 6:48
Perhaps, but I have been able to glean an inordinate abount of information using just StackOverflow. I guess it depends on the person. – Optimal Solutions Jan 16 '10 at 4:26
Not StackOverflow -- they don't think Excel is real programming. They migrated my question about Excel from there to superuser. (superuser.com/questions/139449/…) – Jay Elston May 5 '11 at 0:12
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I have also been able to get some darn good help from folks on Youtube via their tutorials.

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I am learning from Pro Excel 2007 VBA, Jim DeMarco, Apress publishing. So far, starting third chapter, no complaints. SuperUser and StackOverflow for targeted questions. MSDN Online for reference, and as a last resort, googling for blog entries and forum (mostly a waste of time) posts.

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One of the best resources with high quality VBA source code to answer hundreads of common programming tasks: http://www.cpearson.com/Excel/Topic.aspx

Another VERY useful resource is the Excel 2010 Developer Reference (you can usually use this even if you program against an earlier version of Excel) which documents all objects and their properties, methods, etc: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff846392.aspx

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