Microsoft has done an excellent job of integrating its Office suite of products. So if you are familiar with Visual Basic for Applications (VBA), you can use it to programmatically perform tasks within each Office product, like Excel, Word or Powerpoint. Or, within one of these products, you can write an application that can invoke an instance of another program.
Within one book, Stephens shows an efficient and unified way to learn how to do all this, and more. The trick is to be able to use VBA as a macro programming language. This is the key to understanding and using MS Office as a coherent entity. Ultimately, Stephens suggests that it is quicker than learning how to program each product on a case-by-case basis.
Stephens cheerfully dumps on other texts that call you an idiot or dummy. (If you know what I mean.) He unabashedly expects you to be conversant in VB or VBA. To be specific, he doesn't waste time going over the elementary syntactical points of VBA. So you don't have to thumb through these pages in idle frustration. He drags you rapidly into non-trivial coding explanations of how to use VBA to get at MS Office.
