Excel User Conference Update
August 15, 2008 • JP • No Comments • Rate This Article
I finally registered for the 2008 East Coast Excel User Conference!
If you aren't familiar with the conference, Day One is for intermediate subjects, while Day Two is for more advanced subjects. So naturally being inclined to push my abilities as far as they can go, I opted for the more advanced session. There are a hundred different ways to register (which seriously took me an hour of uninterrupted time to figure out), but I opted for the single Thursday session (Day Two). So I will be listening to Jon Peltier talk about interactivity between Office applications, Bob Umlas talk about array formulas, Bernard Liengme talk about Solver, and Damon Longworth talk about Pivot Tables!
I'm not concerned about the cost, but really about the amount of travel time and time spent away from work. That's why I chose just the one day to attend, but I figured that is what would be most helpful in terms of Excel training. So I'm going to drive in the night before and then drive home right after the last class (after a quick dinner, of course). I'll probably be exhausted on Friday, but it's Friday, no work gets done anyway so I won't need to be conscious 
I also decided to buy a new laptop for the conference. Something cheap that I can use for a few years for working on stuff when I'm out of the house. I settled on an Acer model. Basically I'm using a one-day conference as an excuse to buy a new toy 
It comes with Vista (hmm) and I plan to load a copy of Office 2003 Pro on it. I'm not sure about the conference policy, but hopefully I can videotape or do some audio recording.
I've slowly started to branch out into other areas of code. InformIT has a selection of free online books; it's the same as the print version, and you can't download anything, but you just have to read it online.
There are several different titles from the popular "Sams Teach Yourself" series, such as "Teach Yourself XML in 21 Days" and "Teach Yourself C# in 24 Hours". They are pretty basic tutorials, but a nice starting point until I find something more advanced to read. And Amazon has some dirt cheap copies if I feel like getting my hands on something printed for reading on the subway. Of course I am reading "Teach Yourself Visual Basic 6 in 24 Hours", and already downloaded the Express edition of Visual Basic 2008 to practice with. When I write my first non-VBA-based program I'll do a happy dance and maybe I'll post a copy of it here.
Enjoy,
JP
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I'm just an average guy who writes VBA code for a living. This is my personal blog. Excel and Outlook are my thing, with a sprinkle of Access and Word here and there. Follow this space if you want to learn more about VBA. Keep Reading »
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Since you know VBA, I think mastering VB will be a breeze. Why the Visual Basic 6 book though? I'd think you'd want something more recent, like .Net?
Gotta start somewhere
Besides, VB6 looks almost directly translatable to VBA without much effort, and since VBA isn't going anywhere, it would help with more advanced subjects like APIs.
Thx,
JP
Makes sense. Does VBA evolve with versions of windows products, e.g. is VBA for 2007 office products different from VBA for 2003 office products? Just something I've always wondered about.
By the way, have fun at the conference!!
Yes, there are slight changes. For example, there are new features added in newer versions that aren't available in older versions, and old features that only work in older versions. Application.FileSearch doesn't work in Office 2007, but still works in prior versions. In Outlook, many of the CDO functions that were part of a separate library were integrated into the OL 2007 object model. So they are available directly in Outlook 2007, whereas if you are programming in OL 2003, you would need to reference the CDO object model.