This book is weird. Who is it written for? At the back of the book there is a little appendix telling you all about Fortran, C++, and other things which have nothing to do with the book's topic.

The title is "writing word macros" but you can find much better information about that on the internet than in this book.

For some bizarre reason the author prints out pages upon pages of lists of all the properties and methods of objects - just trying to fill out space?

The oddest thing about the book is that the cover keeps curling up. Also the printing quality in the copy I got is diabolical - it looks like it was printed on a cheap laser printer with a shortage of toner.

Save your money.

Many of the reviews here are very unfair to this book.

Overall, this is an excellent book. Steven Roman covers exactly what you need to know about Word programming. As the author states in his intro, this book does not do any handholding and it's not padded with extraneous junk. It gives you just the facts and enough information to get you started. This book is not for beginners - it's directed at someone who has a reasonable competency in programming. Not an advanced progarmmer; just a basic knowledge of VB and an idea of how to work with Objects.

Note he often does not give big sections of code which you can just slightly modify to get it to do what you want. He gives short illustrations that any programmer would know how to integrate into existing code.

The first 9 chapters are virtually the same as the first 9 chapters of another one of his books, Writing Excel Macros with VBA. This is provided to get non-programmers up to speed before the real meat of the book, which starts on page 128.

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 is probably the best book one can buy for learning VBA and Word. That said, one should also note that it is a terrible book. The trouble is that there is no other book available that covers this subject.



I refer to this book all the time I am trying to program VBA, but most of the time the book is no more help than what I can get by using Microsoft help. I have wasted hundreds of hours (no exaggeration) trying to find out information that should be in this book but is not there. He makes a plug for you to send him money for his "enhanced object model browser" because the one in Word "gives only a flat one-dimensional view of the object model" whereas his is "two-dimensional". He nowhere explains what he means by those terms, and the illustrations he gives do not help one either.



Before buying this book you should first be a professional programmer who uses VBA already. Mr. Roman assumes you know many things that he will not explain. That might be OK if he would give more programming examples so that one could try to extract from the examples the steps that his book does not explain. On a more positive note, Mr. Roman likes to explain things that most persons who buy this book already know: the different kinds of variables, the importance of declaring variables before using them, and so forth.



It would have been better if in the draft stage he had had some neophyte try to work with what he had written so that he would know where he contradicts himself and where he leaves out material one has to know to make things work. A better solution would be for him to read John Walkenbach's "Excel ... Power Programming with VBA" and then try to imitate that for Word.



One wishes that someone else could write a book on VBA for Word. I hope Mr. Roman's students at CSU Fullerton have the opportunity to ask him questions to get him on the right track when he is unclear. Unfortunately his readers do not have that ability.

This is probably the best book one can buy for learning VBA and Word. That said, one should also note that it is a terrible book. The trouble is that there is no other book available that covers this subject.

I refer to this book all the time I am trying to program VBA, but most of the time the book is no more help than what I can get by using Microsoft help. I have wasted hundreds of hours (no exaggeration) trying to find out information that should be in this book but is not there. He makes a plug for you to send him money for his "enhanced object model browser" because the one in Word "gives only a flat one-dimensional view of the object model" whereas his is "two-dimensional". He nowhere explains what he means by those terms, and the illustrations he gives do not help one either.

Before buying this book you should first be a professional programmer who uses VBA already. Mr. Roman assumes you know many things that he will not explain. That might be OK if he would give more programming examples so that one could try to extract from the examples the steps that his book does not explain. On a more positive note, Mr. Roman likes to explain things that most persons who buy this book already know: the different kinds of variables, the importance of declaring variables before using them, and so forth.

It would have been better if in the draft stage he had had some neophyte try to work with what he had written so that he would know where he contradicts himself and where he leaves out material one has to know to make things work. A better solution would be for him to read John Walkenbach's "Excel ... Power Programming with VBA" and then try to imitate that for Word.

One wishes that someone else could write a book on VBA for Word. I hope Mr. Roman's students at CSU Fullerton have the opportunity to ask him questions to get him on the right track when he is unclear. Unfortunately his readers do not have that ability.

This is probably the best book one can buy for learning VBA and Word. That said, one should also note that it is a terrible book. The trouble is that there is no other book available that covers this subject.

I refer to this book all the time I am trying to program VBA, but most of the time the book is no more help than what I can get by using Microsoft help. I have wasted hundreds of hours (no exaggeration) trying to find out information that should be in this book but is not there. He makes a plug for you to send him money for his "enhanced object model browser" because the one in Word "gives only a flat one-dimensional view of the object model" whereas his is "two-dimensional". He nowhere explains what he means by those terms, and the illustrations he gives do not help one either.

Before buying this book you should first be a professional programmer who uses VBA already. Mr. Roman assumes you know many things that he will not explain. That might be OK if he would give more programming examples so that one could try to extract from the examples the steps that his book does not explain. On a more positive note, Mr. Roman likes to explain things that most persons who buy this book already know: the different kinds of variables, the importance of declaring variables before using them, and so forth.

It would have been better if in the draft stage he had had some neophyte try to work with what he had written so that he would know where he contradicts himself and where he leaves out material one has to know to make things work. A better solution would be for him to read John Walkenbach's "Excel ... Power Programming with VBA" and then try to imitate that for Word.

One wishes that someone else could write a book on VBA for Word. I hope Mr. Roman's students at CSU Fullerton have the opportunity to ask him questions to get him on the right track when he is unclear. Unfortunately his readers do not have that ability.

As someone who has been making a living writing Office macros for the past three years, I'd say this is the book I refer to most often. I taught myself Word VBA with this one book, after having briefly studied Excel VBA with SAMS Excel Programming (Podlin/Webb).

Even now that I'm working in XP, the book is as useful as ever as a quick reference for solutions to common tasks, for descriptions of Word objects, and answers when "Help" is no help at all.

It's certainly possible to learn Word VBA from zero with this book, but if you prefer a structured 'teach yourself' course with excercises, then you'd better get another book to go with this one. A good start might be Sams Teach Yourself Microsoft Word 2000 Automation in 24 Hours.

I think the review from "A reader from Lawrenceville" got it right.

It is not a good book. It is mostly a list of the various classes and their properties and methods. It can be useful for getting an overview, but it soon becomes tedious.

It does not cover vital suff like Word application event handling.

I suppose the only reason that it still sells is that all the other Word VBA books are out of print.