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.

Other Reviews

• unexpected
• Indispensable Resource
• Good examples but some strange best practices
• Virtually Useless
• Needed Coverage of a Specific Topical Area