Spreadsheets Books

This book is filled with everything you ever wanted to know about excel. Great reference with fun tips like games and making your excel talk!

Not really for true beginners, but an excellent reference book for those times when one thinks to themself, "How do I do that ___ again?"

I think the book was very good at giving examples on doing things that you might run into while making use of excel. In between the examples, you'll find a tip on a shortcut key or other, "I didn't know that" type information. The two weaknesses that I would give it are:
1) No example CD so I could follow along with the book (this was painful because I had to take time to create similar examples)
2) I wish it would go over all the shortcut keys. Perhaps I missed this but I have found these to be useful and wish the material had been better organized so that you could find them all in one place rather than sporadically buried in an example that had no indication it was teaching you a new shortcut.
Alas, there is much more positive than negative and I would definitely recommend the book to someone wanting to enhance their excel skills and learn a lot of tips they might have never learned otherwise.

This book is very well done. It's straight-forward, covers a wide amount of topics, and is practical in how it uses examples to demonstrate available functions. The only thing the book could have fleshed out more is macros.

Great amazon seller. I really like this book. It was shipped promptly. Highly recommended.

Woody's book (and WOW site) offer the very best practical and error-avoiding advice on using MS Outlook 97. Using Outlook is very different from using other Office applications. The file management aspect is thoroughly confusing and inflexible. Woody's book helps deal with this thorny issue.

As a software trainer and consultant, I am always looking for good books. This book is not good -- it's GREAT! The information on pgs.643 to 647 is worth much more than the price of the book! A must have....

Until now I have practically only been reading the Outlook 98 part of the book, as this part was the most urgent from my point of view. I have certainly not been disappointed. But on the other hand I had not expected less as a keen reader of Woody's Office Watch (WOW) and Woody's Window Watch (WWW). I am really looking forward to the rest of the book. It is a pleasure reading and learning from a book where there are a lot of humour included.

I have been using Office 97 for 1 1/2 years and have taken college courses in Word 97 and Excel 97. Having received certificates in both courses I thought that I knew it all. RIGHT! Woody Leonhard has taught me about the easy ways to execute commands. His shortcuts are invaluable to me. I am a quadriplegic and find his advice very helpful and time saving. I am learning Powerpoint 97 in far less time than it would of taken me in school. I believe he has been most helpful in making me a real power user. Thanks to Woody and his gang.

Clear, concise and easy instructions on how to use MS Ofc 97. Points out the good, bad and ugly of Microsoft products. Can turn any novice into more of a professional than he/she ever dreamed of! I recommend this book to anyone who will be working with MS Ofc 97! Don't pass this one up!

This is an excellent hands-on learning guide. I have been able to put the new skills to use in my own personal files right away.

Very useful guide for studying for the MS Office Specialist certification.
Well laid out.

This is the best book ever for someone that needs to learn anything about excel and how to use the spreadsheets, workbooks and any function within. I would recommend this book to users that have never used excel to the more advanced user that needs to utilize other aspects that they have never used before. Great book.

Excellent how-to book!!! you will be taken by your hand to learn in a easy way how to work in excel

I am so glad I bought this book in that it went and showed me the little details that you may not always hit in your normal day to day workings of Excel. I also bought Microsoft office step by step but I never got to use it as this book was all I needed! I will be buying the Microsoft Wor dversion next.

Oh by the was within two weeks I took the specialist test and passed by quite a bit.

A good book that has a lot of Domino Information.
I find myself referencing it from time to time.
A nice tool to have at your disposal.

Although this book is a bit dated covering Domino R5, I would still say it has been a very valuable aide in learing Domino/Lotus administration on R6.5.3. I wish there had been some flow charts on the routing process at the end of chapter 8, and some packet header diagrams of the Notes RPC protocol.

I would recommend this book to anyone new to the Domino/Lotus notes world.

Great Reference. Go here first then look elswhere! I just HOPE Mr. Kirkland and NewRiders come to some agreement and get an updated version for R6/6.5 soon to be 7 out.

Invaluable!!!!! If I had to do in the trenches domino administration and could only bring one book with me this would be it.

When I was a Jr. Notes Administrator this book gave me the level of knowledge and understanding of Domino and Lotus Notes that I needed to move into a more senior position in a very short amount of time. My now-dogeared copy is still by my side every day at work as I continue to learn from this all-inclusive, easy-to-read manual. From setting up your first server to understanding Domino system architecture, "Domino System Administration" covers it all. This book is truly a "must have". I am desperately hoping that Mr. Kirkland writes an updated version for Domino/Notes 6!

If you buy any book for administering Lotus Notes/Domino, buy this one.

This book of advanced Excel development was recommended to me by a co-worker whose project I inherited that used the concepts in the book based on the "Petras Template" example. It's classy and polished VBA programming and sure, you can brag about the concepts to the techies interviewing you during your next job hunt.

But, be careful.

The book introduces us to the concept of add-ins and templates. So, there you are showing off your project to your manager or users. But, what do they click on? The add-in or the template? What are all those true/false cells over there? How can the user save the workbook? What heppens if you forget to hide the columns that use cell logic. Hmmm. These questions and others will be asked of your typically non-technical users who have NO idea what goes on behind the scenes. If they open up the template and screw around with the code or re-name the add-in, you'll have chaos.

To be fair, there's tons of advanced concepts to learn here and no doubt you'll benefit from them. But, remember, as a developer, your first goal is to produce a robust application. However, you may have click a couple of functions to get all tabs in your template to show. If you don't do that, you can't see them! Oh, and don't forget to save your add-in.xla or all your changes won't take effect.

Not for beginners or dummies, but for VERY careful developers!

This is a great book for power programmers. But be aware, this book is not for those who want to learn Excel. It's just for those who know Excel and want to imrove their programming capabilities.

When picking up this book, I was an advanced Excel user. Having discovered most of its features by trial-and-error, and coming from a fairly solid programming background, I understood well the interaction between the underlying object model and the sheets appearing on the screen to end users. I have also crafted many sophisticated worksheet formulas, and explored just about every suggestion of literature such as "Excel Hacks" and "Advanced Excel Report Development".

Professional Excel Development offers ideas and tools necessary for designing full-fledged, robust Excel-based applications. It does not spend time explaining how various features work, but rather goes into detail on how to put these features to best use.

Here is what I picked up from this book, together with the authors' Excel 2003 VBA reference:
* ways to leverage Excel's built-in features to avoid excessive coding
* advanced design techniques for using Excel as a WYSIWYG interface designer
* techniques for creating custom menu bars and programming their behavior
* various means of interacting with the user and simplifying their sessions by providing guidance as to which steps need to be taken
* restricting the Excel environment to take on the appearance of a product condusive of the goal stated in previous bullet
* using VBA in conjunction with the Excel object model to create powerful object-oriented structures for spreadsheet-based applications
* programming Excel-based solutions in an executable to provide a more standalone application
* using Windows API calls to increase robustness of the application

One key feature of this book is its consistent approach. The authors maintain a consistent structure, using the same application throughout the book for their "practical example" to demonstrate new features made available through the material in each chapter. Also, the "best practices" approach provides a level of consistency that is generally desired of anywhat sophisticated applications. Useable modules are provided on the accompanying CD, ready to be used in readers' own applications.

In the beginning, the authors explain the audiences for which this book may or may not be intended. They separate these into users, power users, VBA developers, Excel developers, and professional developers. The latter three categories of users will benefit the most from this book, each in his/her own way. VBA developers will learn how to use built-in features (I think this is where I started); Excel developers will learn how to incorporate Excel-based solutions into larger applications; Professional developers will be exposed to a great variety of "best practices", optimization techniques, and various other means for developing consistency in Excel applications.

If you do not fall into the latter three categories, you might not pick up much from this book. It is not useless to you, however; you can still find many worksheet/userform design techniques, and get an introduction to the kind of power VBA-based programming can offer. Nonetheless, you may be well-advised to start off with something simpler, such as John Walkenbach's Excel Power Programming (as alluded to by the authors of this book), simply because the present book assumes a good degree of knowledge and leaves much for the reader to figure out from the fully-functional examples provided - thereby covering the ground that it does.

Overall, this book makes for a wonderful reference to the various under-the-hood features of Excel. Even if you've already encountered many of the techniques described, and could technically discover them further on your own, it is useful to have them readily available in a single collection. Very few items are left out; application design, object-oriented programming techniques, database applications, debugging techniques, Office automation, and external interop are all covered here. Professional Excel Development is a solid reference to be consulted for years to come.

When you search the web and most of the books around, you can find solution to your problems most of the time, but you are rarely sure it was the best way to do it and how it would fit to the rest of your code. The authors of this book are not afraid to tell what they suppose to be the best for you, along with full featured versions of code illustrating each chapter.

I found it easy to take the code from a sufficiently leveled chapter and adapt it to get just the application that I needed, knowing it would be fast, clean and complete at the same time, although I didn't understand all the details at first. Now, the book serves as a widely findable documentation for the packages that I make. Highly recommendable.

Buy this book because you want to be able to use VBA to help you at work. I wrote a program to automatically generate and send reports via email - about 500 of them - and my boss was in awe.

You CAN develop VBA custome applications where the user can't see the underlying MS Office application, i.e., Excel for example. They use your program like any stand-alone application. COOL!!!

If I could get someone to write down everything I don't know about LotusScript and Java, it would fill a book. Well, this is that book.

Hatter and Banks aren't wordy and target this book strictly at the experienced developer looking for a reference work. That makes this incredibly useful. These days I carry this book (thankfully light despite being 700 pages) between sites all the time. The lovely posters from Lotus might list all the properties and methods, but these guys provide the details underneath it.

The remarks on each class are pertinent, yet brief (as for NotesRichTextItem, "you must call the save method of the parent Notes document to save the data to disk") They include examples not only for classes, but also occasionally for methods and properties.

Interestingly, a quick check of the index for 'Index, databases' found only a reference to the updateFTIndex method for Java Database class and not to the LotusScript NotesDatabase class, while 'Registering Users' listed the LotusScript page and not the Java one. Perhaps the editors need to work on that. Fortunately, they provide a lot of cross-references on the pages, giving you page numbers for the classes mentioned in the text, reducing the need to refer to the table of contents or the index.

The print's small, but they use fonts, abbreviations and familiar symbols to get the message across clearly.

On balance, it's well worth the (money) I paid Amazon for it - it probably saved me an hour today and none of our hours come cheap, do they?

I bought this book originally expecting a full reference to Lotus and at first was a little dissappointed that it only covered LotusScript and Java. After reading it, now it is the only reference I use for LotusScript. I too have several other books, but none give the information and detaill in an easy to read format like this book. Anything you want to know about Classes, Methods, Properties, Events, and new R5 LotusScript features are covered in this book in detail with good examples. I also like how each class has it's own contents page giving page numbers for all of the assosiated Properties, Methods, and Events for QUICK reference.

This book has minimized my LotusScript related headaches! It is a one-stop resource for methods and properties for the predefined LotusScript Classes. It is hard to believe, but ()it takes me less time to write scripts, which gives me more time to enjoy the finer things in life. I would highly recommend this book to anyone, beginner or advanced.

The authors did a great job providing examples of how the properties and methods are used. I haven't written any Java yet, but when I do this book will be right by my side!

If you are new to LotusScript do not buy this book. This is a reference book for LotusScript and Java classes and a very good one at that. The developer help files can be confusing at times and it always helps to have a reference book near you.

If you are an intermediate or experienced Notes developer this is a terrific book, I have it by my desk all the time.

If you want a book to teach you LotusScript but Practical LotusScript it's great!

Exactly what I've been looking for: A no nonsense reference manual for the LotusScript and Java class libraries. Probably the most useful book a professional Notes/Domino developer can have.

My 15-month old son LOVES this book ever since he was 9 months-old. We read it every night before he goes to bed. Taro Gomi has captured simple creatures in life and have made them animated and good teachers. The illustrations are purely magical. I highly recommend this book to kids, young and old.

Our son loves this book - and we love reading it to him. It's such a great sentiment, that we can learn so much from those around us. We're connected to our friends, and each one has a gift that we can appreciate. And the illustrations are fantastic.

I have been collecting bilingual books to read to my children and to help our whole family learn Spanish. This is one of our favorites and one the kids will listen to without complaining about me reading in Spanish (which is a problem with some other books with more words on each page). I highly recommend this book and have been buying copies to give to friends.

If you have a toddler, you know how much they enjoy hearing the same story over and over again. This book is sure to be one of your little one's favorites. The simple pictures and truncated text make this a great book for toddlers. And because there's no real storyline to follow, you can skip a few pages here and there if you need to... at least, until your little one is old enough to catch onto you.

My Friends by Taro Gomi is a beautifully illustrated book about learning simple skills...with a little help from your friends. And in this story, all creatures (from the tiniest ant to the teachers at school) are your friends. My daughter loves this book, reciting page after page which friend teaches her what task. The overall message of this book is that a child can learn something from everyone and everything.

The artwork is delightful: colorful, simple, and crisp. The language sounds lyrical, even poetic, as you read it aloud. This book will capture the imagination of your child. Whenever we read it, my daughter gives me different examples of who has taught her what. It is a great conversation starter!

I recommend this engaging book for all toddlers, beginning readers, or anyone who enjoys a sweet story.

This book is clearly written and user friendly. Biafore gives links to information sources, making it easy for the reader to get more information on each of the hacks. These links alone are worth the price of the book.

I've been trading for over twenty years, including a period as a floor trader on the Chicago Board of Trade. Even with that experience there are tips and tricks in this book I found useful to the point where I employ them daily. To be complete as a reviewer I will say there is a lot of pretty basic stuff from my point of view, but still well worth reviewing since some of it I had forgotten.

Well written, easy reading, well organized

Online Investing Hacks is an excellent introduction to the world of investment. Though the title does contain the word 'Online', I would say that the general information the book provides on investing is not limited to the online realm.

Overall, I was very happy with the book, and found it incredibly useful. Though I do have several investments (401K, some stock, mutual funds etc) I would hardly consider myself an authority on the subject. This book provided very detailed explanations and tips on various forms of investment, from CD's to Index funds, and everything in between. While the experienced investor might not glean much from reading this book, anyone just getting started will find it an excellent reference, and resource.

The format of the book is similar to the other books in the 100 * Hacks series published by O'Reilly. There are exactly 100 hacks, or topics, which are spread across 9 chapters. Each one is an individual entity and can be read and understood without reliance on any of the other hacks.

One minor annoyance I had with the book is that it is geared toward those of you who, for some reason or another, run Microsoft's Windows OS, or have access to Microsoft Excel. Luckily, of the Excel examples that I played with, Open Office's Calc program handled them with minimal tweaking.

I can easily recommend this book to anyone who wants to invest, but is unsure of what to invest in, or needs some tips on making the most of preexisting investments. Those of you who enjoy research and building your own stats and graphs will also find parts of this book rather intriguing, as it covers data acquisition and manipulation with Excel in great detail. It will make an excellent addition to my reference shelf, and I have a feeling it will be well thumbed through in a very short time.

It seems like everyone is involved in investing in some form or another. While I always felt like I should be investing too, it was never clear to me how to begin this process. After all, it's my money. How can I be sure I'm investing in something that will provide some sort of reasonable return? This book is an excellent resource in answering some of those questions and putting the new investor on the right track.

This book is written in the same format as the other "hacks" series by O'Reilly. This format is very easy to read, and the format makes it very easy to find answers. Rather then having to read the book from cover to cover, the reader can pick out topics they are dealing with, read the answer, and move on. Since many of the people interesting in a book of this nature will likely have little time, the book's format works to its advantage.

The book begins with some basic introduction to the stock market and tips for selecting appropriate stocks or mutual funds. The whole middle section of the book deals with data analysis. The author discusses how to understand a company's balance sheet (e.g. what that P/E ratio means), how to spot companies in financial trouble, how to pick a good stock, and even how to trade. There is also a good discussion on minimizing the effect of taxes on your little return on investment.

The author even goes further and gets into a discussion on financial planning. In addition to discussing debt reduction, the author also talks about IRA plans and different strategies for saving for your child's education expenses. I think my favorite part of this book was the discussion on different education savings plans. The author discusses the ins and outs (as well as tax consequences) of each of the plans, and provides some examples illustrating the fact that it's better to start saving earlier than later.

This is an excellent book, not just for its investing advice, but also for its sound financial planning. This is a great book for anyone who is interested in increasing their wealth, saving for a rainy day, or simply saving for future financial goals.

Online Investing Hacks by Bonnie Biafore (O'Reilly) is one of those books that can pay for itself in short order, as well as over and over.

Chapter list: Screening Investments; Hacking Excel for Financial Analysis; Collecting Financial Data; Analyzing Company Fundamentals; Technical Analysis; Executing Trades; Investing in Mutual Funds; Managing Your Portfolio; Financial Planning; Index

I worked at Enron from 1998 through 2001, and spent plenty of time during that dot.com era following my stock portfolio. I watched my Enron stock value go from incredible value to a point where it cost more to sell the stock than it was worth. I won a few bets (face it, that's what they were) on a few dot.coms and lost many more. What could have been an incredible nest egg, isn't. This book would have been a lifesaver if I had read and paid attention to it a few years ago. Biafore shows you how you can analyze and invest wisely using a variety of tools available to everyone.

If you're an Excel user, you'll find it an invaluable tool for analysis. She'll show you how you can use it to create financial charts (#13), calculate compound annual rates of growth (#26), and use rational values to buy and sell wisely (#36). #39 - Spot Hanky Panky with Cash Flow Analysis (using Enron as an example) would have literally saved me hundreds of thousands of dollars had I known about it. Even if you don't care about the investing tips, the hack on downloading data via Excel web queries (#7) was something I didn't know how to do (or that you could even do it!). The book has a little something for everyone.

As with all Hacks titles, you probably won't be interested in every single item. Some may not be applicable to your situation or may be too complex for what you care to handle. But all it would take is one hack to work out and change your investing for this book to pay huge dividends. If you do your own investing, you owe it to yourself to get this book.

This is a handy little reference for a variety of time-saving tips and tricks. You'll definitely be able to economize your daily activities if you keep this book near you when building your reports and analyses. Don't be surprised if you dog-ear quite a few pages.

JR

An Excel User doesn't need to spend years in learning Excel, thus to get the most of it. An Excel User needs to know how to "kill the time" through Excel's Abilities. An Excel User just needs a book as "This isn't Excel it's Magic". It is a friendly Piece of Advise submitted in a gracious manner by the Excel Magician Bob Umlas,Microsoft Most Valuable Professional.This book will become "A Daily Excel Encyclopedia" to everyone who looks for Excel proficiency in job accomplishment.
A 21 century Excel User deserves this book. Do not miss Bob's Excel CLEVERNESS!!!
Pavlina

This book is full of quick hints that can save you time and frustration when working with Microsoft Excel. Many functions were identified that I never knew existed. This book is definitely worth the price. Enjoy!!!

What a handy little book chuck full of hints, tips and techniques by Bob Umlas. Bob Umlas is a Microsoft MVP and has held that honor since 1995 for his dedication to various online groups

The book is organized into 6 categorizing chapters: Features, Formulas, Keyboard Shortcuts, Printing, Miscellaneous, and VBA. It contains 142 pages with 84 tricks, tips and manipulative techniques, some of which are quite useful.

Some of the techniques covered are ones that you probably learned at some point but have forgotten. Others will be old tricks applied differently that will give you a new perspective. Plus there are many advanced features that are explained to stretch your skills. What impresses me the most is the practicality of what is presented in the book. The majority of the techniques are useful hints that can be put into practice rather easily.

This isn't Excel, It's Magic! is a fantastic book. I thought I knew a lot about Excel; but I now realize how little I did know. It is hard to pick a favorite because there are so many great head spinning, jaw dropping tips & tricks.

The book is well written with easy to follow examples. It makes unlocking the power of Excel an amazing experience. 85 great topics ranging from using advance filters to using vba bookmarks. A must have for beginning and expert users everywhere.

Thanks for a great time saving book, Mr. Umlas. You are a true magician!!

Having seen a multitude of books offering either statistical analysis techniques or suggestions around data mining tools, it is refreshing to see someone approach the subject using simple, readily available tools and a practical, business oriented approach to the topic. The apparently mundane subject of customer retention coupled with buying patterns and market basket analysis is laid out in an effective and sequential manner. The SQL examples take some getting used to but, once understood, offer a series of easily implemented and highly effective methods to illustrate the concepts shown in the book. As a reference guide and an illustration that one needs to know the questions to be asked of the data before investing in the latest drag and drop business intelligence tools, this book is unparalleled. The author has not stinted on providing a wealth of examples and explanation. If this tome is a reflection of how Mr Linoff and his team approach their real world consulting activities, they must be a formidable team indeed.

For anyone who has wrestled with a means to understand their customer buying patterns and product affinity patterns in their historical sales data, this book cannot be beaten

"Data Analysis Using SQL and Excel" is an valuable resource for business intelligence and data mining practitioners in all industries. Having said that, I would like to offer some solid practical advice to potential readers that might not be fluent in statistics or data mining.

First, the reader should have a solid understanding of SQL. If the extent of your SQL interaction comes through a program on the level of Access, then you can still benefit from this book, but you will have to apply yourself more than others. Keep in mind, that proprietary releases of SQL might cause problems in directly translating the author's examples.

Second, if your statistics knowledge is a little rusty, have a secondary resource on-hand. Sometimes the definitions or explanations of the statistical concepts may not be as intuitive for some readers as they are for others.

With those caveats in mind, the reader need only to keep his or her patience and work through the concepts of the first 4-5 chapters. These chapters tend toward simple exposition of the concepts. For those with little patience, it may seem as if it is just a laundry list of concepts with little effort to tie those concepts into practical uses. Thinking like this is a great way to miss the enormous benefits of the book!

For me, the "Ah Ha!" moment came in Chapter 6 and 7. The concepts I had worked on in the previous chapters suddenly came together with customer tenure onward, when the techniques use will call to mind everything learned in the previous chapters.

In short, spend plenty of time in the first few chapters - the extra effort to master those concepts will only enhance the benefits of later chapters.

Lastly, there are a few odd differences between the text and the files downloadable from the web site. Whenever I hit a snag based on the text, opening the accompanying Excel files and seeing the formulas, queries or table/graph structures resolved all issues for me.

This is a text that will always have a place on my shelves.

If you work, like me, on data warehousing, data mining, analytical CRM or similar projects, this book will save you a lot of time, and provide you with a lot of inspiration.
Statistical concepts are clearly explained, and examples with very smart SQL queries and Excel sheets are shown.
For instance, no other book will explain you so clearly Survival Analysis, and how to practically implement it (I mean, with working code!).
As a previous reviewer wrote, why should you believe me? I'm one of the authors of another Wiley book, "MDX Solutions", and I earn my living by consulting with DaisyLabs, a Business Intelligence company.
Keep Gordon's book on SQL, and my book on MDX, on your desk, and no data analysis project will scare you anymore!

Utilizing data to drive results is critical to the success of any organization. Many know this to be true, but don't know how to go about it. "Data Analysis Using SQL and Excel" by Gordon Linoff successfully shows the way using a holistic approach of "data - analysis - presentation". Its success is based on a number attributes including....

1. Wide Audience: Different groups of people are addressed. Management and leadership will see what is possible with great examples (e.g. "Three Scenarios" on pg 333). "Doers" (e.g. analysts) get a clear view of the big picture along with the ever so important how-to aspects (which is often not included in other texts).

2. Popular Tools: As the title states, this book utilizes Microsoft Excel and SQL. Not only are these tools often readily available, but many people are familiar with at least one of these, if not both. This familiarity enables the reader to focus more on learning useful approaches than the tools themselves.

3. Methods: A host of useful methods are covered from Survival Analysis to the more traditional like RFM. All, especially those related to statistics, are explained well - simple but not so simple as to be inaccurate or incomplete.

In my opinion, "Data Analysis Using SQL and Excel" is invaluable to those who want to get the most out of their organization's data.

Wow - if you need a book that: 1. describes basic data analysis and statistical concepts in an easy to understand but thorough way. 2. uses real world business examples that you run into every day. 3. gives you the recipes of how to implement them in your business with real world computer tools like SQL and Excel. 4. and is written by a proven authority in the field (4 books and two decades of consulting). Then this is your book.

But why should you believe me? Just a little on my background. I wrote two books on databases and data analysis for McGraw-Hill: "Building Data Mining Applications for CRM" and "Data Warehousing, Data Mining and OLAP" and have led teams that have built data mining engines for super computers that later became Oracle's data mining engine, as well as implementing sophisticated data mining applictions (CART) in SQL and integrated between a relational and OALP database. Though I don't get to do a lot of 'data mining' in my current business I would definitely find this book very useful if I did.

Anyway, I thought this book was tremendously thorough in providing common sense explanations on everything from the Null Hypothesis to the Monty Hall Paradox (very cool). Buy this book if you want a single reference that will allow you to quickly solve real world business problems in a rational and doable way.