The Barnes & Noble Review
Like millions of folks, you've used Excel for years. You know the basics. Now that you're upgrading to Excel 2007, you're ready to go beyond them. You're ready to go "Beyond the Manual," too. Helen Dixon's Excel 2007: Beyond the Manual will deepen your knowledge of the intermediate-to-advanced features that experts use to build high-powered workbooks.
Dixon trains PC and Office users for a living: She knows how to explain this stuff so you'll understand it. Here, she begins with a quick fly-over of Excel 2007's improvements (new interface and formats, slicker formatting, more powerful analysis tools, and so forth.) There's a quick review of the essentials, but even here, there's new stuff to cover, such as Excel's Name Manager for working with defined names, as well as Microsoft's souped-up conditional formatting.
Dixon walks through sorting and filtering, introducing Excel's powerful new date, text, and number filters and helping you make the most of Advanced Filtering. There's a thorough discussion of data analysis with subtotals and consolidations, plus two full chapters on Excel's revamped PivotTables and PivotCharts. (With Dixon's help and Microsoft's simplifications, these features are way more usable now.)
Dixon then turns to what-if analysis, demystifying scenarios, Goal Seek, and Solver. You'll learn how to build more effective formulas and functions and use Excel's improved chart engine and graphics support. Especially helpful: chapters on preventing and correcting errors, and securing your workbooks.
Finally, since no workbook's an island, Dixon walks you through integrating data from external sources; then sharing, reviewing, and distributing your workbooks, with or without SharePoint and Microsoft's new Excel Services.
Not long ago, we gave props to another book in this series, Windows Vista: Beyond the Manual. This one's equally good. Apress's series is new, but these books are worth keeping an eye out for. Bill Camarda, from the May 2007 Read Only
