Do you consider yourself to be an “idiot” or a “dummy”? I certainly hope not! So why do some programming books treat you as if you are? They start from scratch and explain in excruciating detail how to make comments, declare variables, and build For loops. That may make sense if you’ve never programmed before, but if you’re already an experienced VB or VBA programmer and you want to expand your skills, such books are a mind-numbing bore to read.

If you Want to learn how to program the core Microsoft Office applications (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access and Outlook), you could buy five different books that begin with practically the same 400-page introduction to writing subroutines, using strings and placing controls on a form. You’re lucky to get 200 pages of new material from a 600-page book.

I take an approach very different from these beginner-type books. I assume you know the basics of VB or VBA, skip the tiresome explanations of variable declarations, and dive right into serious Office programming topics, such as automatically customizing menus and toolbars with VBA, making OLE do your work for you and using ADO to manipulate data in Access database. I want to give you the most information possible as quickly as possible without rehashing the trivial VB and VBA details you already can recite in your sleep. If you already know how to create an array, find the length of a string, and use If Then statements, then this book can quickly teach you to program Microsoft Office.