About Office Automation Limited

Office Automation Limited is an independent consultancy based in London, England, specialising in application development using the Microsoft Office suite with a focus on Microsoft Excel. We have over ten years experience in developing Excel-based applications for a wide variety of clients worldwide, including some of the world's largest corporations. If you would like more information about Office Automation, or you would like to make use of our services, please contact us.

Services

Office Automation is currently able to offer the following consulting services:

Bespoke application design and development using VBA in Excel and/or Access, Visual Basic 6, SQL Server, XML and/or related technologies.
Spreadsheet redesign and redevelopment to improve robustness, efficiency, usability and ease of ongoing maintenance.
System migration to help you exploit the latest Office technologies.
Extraction and analysis of data from other business systems (e.g. Treasury, Accounting, Marketing, HR, etc.).
On-site assistance to support your development efforts and provide on-the-job training for your staff.

Clients

Office Automation is able and willing to help companies of all sizes, from one-man outfits to multi-national corporations, throughout the world. If you are not within reasonable commuting distance, most work would be performed remotely with regular email communication and conferencing over the Internet. Previous clients have included:

A multinational manufacturer of automotive sensor equipment
One of the world's largest vehicle manufacturers
One of the world's largest Management Consultancies
A multinational oil company in Oslo, Norway
A small Electricity trading company in Oslo, Norway
A small project management consultancy in London, England

Commitment

Office Automation is committed to helping you get the maximum benefit from your Office applications. Whenever work is performed for a client, we make sure that your staff are given the skills and knowledge required to support and maintain the application after the project has been completed.

Office Automation Ltd provides a number of helpful and interesting utilities, examples, tips and techniques to help in your use of Excel and development of Excel solutions.  These files can be found on the Excel, Excel MVP, Smart Indenter and VBE Tools pages of this site,

About Stephen Bullen

Office Automation Ltd is owned and run by Stephen Bullen. A graduate of Oxford University, Stephen has an MA in Engineering, Economics and Management, providing a unique blend of both business and technical skills. He is one of a handful of people worldwide to be awarded Microsoft's Most Valuable Professional award for his Excel skills and has been given the MVP award every year since 1995.

Stephen has been providing Excel consulting and application development services since 1994, originally as an employee of Price Waterhouse Management Consultants and since 1997 as an independent consultant trading under the name of Business Modelling Solutions Limited. In September 2004, BMS changed its name to Office Automation Limited.

In addition to his consulting assignments, Stephen actively supports the Excel user community in Microsoft's peer-to-peer support newsgroups. As part of his support efforts, and as coding examples for potential clients, Stephen provides a number of example Excel files on his Excel Page, many of which demonstrate innovative solutions to tasks which were previously considered impossible.

Books

Stephen Bullen has recently completed Professional Excel Development (published by Addison-Wesley), in partnership with Rob Bovey and with contributions from John Green. The book is targeted at intermediate through to advanced Excel developers and aims to be the natural successor to the Excel 2002 VBA Programmer's Reference, John Walkenbach's Excel Power Programming with VBA and similar beginner to intermediate titles.

More information, including the Table of Contents, a synopsis of each chapter and three sample chapters can be found here.

Buy Professional Excel Development from Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk.

Stephen Bullen co-authored the Excel 2002 VBA Programmer's Reference, (published by Wrox Press) with John Green and contributions from Rob Bovey and Robert Rosenberg. The book is targeted at beginner to intermediate Excel developers, who want to improve their VBA skills. Stephen wrote chapters on:
  • Developing Excel applications for international clients
  • Using Windows API functions in Excel
  • Excel and the Internet
  • Programming the Visual Basic Editor (VBE)
  • Automation Add-ins and COM Add-ins
  • Smart Tags

Buy your copy from Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk and download the code samples from Wrox

More information, including the Table of Contents and a sample chapter (Chapter 22 - International Issues) can be found here.

In June 2004, Wrox Press published the Excel 2003 VBA Programmer's Reference. This update of the Excel 2002 VBA Programmer's Reference was done entirely by Paul Kimmel, without involving any of the original four authors. Unfortunately, the update introduced numerous errors and failed to cover some of the most important enhancements for Excel 2003 - namely the ability to arbitrarily map XML data to worksheet cells and the integration between Excel and .NET.

Contact Information

E-mail: stephen@oaltd.co.uk
By post: Office Automation Ltd.
40 The Charter Road
Woodford Green
London  IG8 9RE
England
Phone: +44 7711 365303