Excel Free

Product Description

“If you’ve never quite grasped formulas and functions, Paul McFedries will radically expand your understanding and use of Excel. And if you’re already an expert and you’re moving up to Excel 2007, this book will quickly show you features you’ve only dreamed of until now…”

—Thomas ‘Duffbert’ Duff, Duffbert’s Random Musings, http://www.twduff.com

 

Develop your Microsoft Excel expertise instantly with proven techniques

• Master Excel Ranges
• Create Powerful Arrays
• Troubleshoot Formula Problems
• Validate Worksheet Data
• Perform What-If Analysis
• Model Your Business
• Track Trends and Make
• Forecasts
• Analyze Data
• Find Optimal Solutions
• Build Dynamic Loan
• Schedules 

Most Microsoft® Excel users learn only a small percentage of the program’s features. They know they could get more out of Excel if they could just get a leg up on building formulas and using functions. Unfortunately, this side of Excel appears complex and intimidating to the uninitiated—shrouded in the mysteries of mathematics, finance, and impenetrable spreadsheet jargon.

Sound familiar? If you’re a businessperson who needs to use Excel as an everyday part of your job, then you’ve come to the right book.  Formulas and Functions with Microsoft® Office Excel 2007 demystifies worksheet formulas and presents the most useful Excel functions in an accessible,  jargon-free way.  This book not only takes you through Excel’s intermediate and advanced formula-building features, it also tells you why these features are useful to you and shows you how to use them in everyday situations. Throughout the book you’ll find no-nonsense, step-by-step tutorials and lots of practical examples aimed directly at business users.

 

     •    Focuses like a laser on the four technologies that you must master to get the most out of Excel: ranges, formulas, functions, and data analysis tools.

     •    Shuns spreadsheet theory in favor of practical know-how that you can put to use right away.

     •    Provides numerous real-world examples and techniques to help you learn and understand the importance of each section.

 

Introduction

1    Getting the Most Out of Ranges

2    Using Range Names

3    Building Basic Formulas

4    Creating Advanced Formulas

5    Troubleshooting Formulas
II    Harnessing the Power of Functions   

6    Understanding Functions

7    Working with Text Functions

8    Working with Logical and Information Functions

9    Working with Lookup Functions

10  Working with Date and Time Functions
11  Working with Math Functions

12  Working with Statistical Functions

III    Building Business Models   

13  Analyzing Data with Tables

14  Analyzing Data with PivotTables

15  Using Excel’s Business-Modeling Tools

16  Using Regression to Track Trends and Make Forecasts

17  Solving Complex Problems with Solver

IV    Building Financial Formulas   

18   Building Loan Formulas

19   Building Investment Formulas

20   Building Discount Formulas

Paul McFedries is well-known as a teacher of Windows and Office, particularly Excel, and is the president of Logophilia Limited, a technical writing company. Paul has been working with spreadsheets for more than 20 years and has been developing Excel solutions since the late 1980s. Now primarily a writer, Paul has written more than 50 books that have sold more than three million copies worldwide. These books include Microsoft Office Access 2007 Forms, Reports, and Queries; Tricks of the Microsoft Office 2007 Gurus (all from Que); and Microsoft Windows Vista Unleashed (Sams).

 

Category  Office Productivity Suite

Covers    Microsoft Office Excel 2007

User Level         Intermediate – Advanced

 

Formulas and Functions with Microsoft Office Excel 2007

When Microsoft Excel is used to construct large and complex spreadsheets containing multiple worksheets, it can become extremely difficult for someone to navigate, let alone track or trace numbers through the spreadsheet with all of the values and formulas contained within it. This is because in a large spreadsheet like a financial model, there can often be hundreds if not thousands of different formula down and across each page including calculations which may contain several links to other sheets within the workbook. The difficulty experienced with navigating through the formulas of large and complex spreadsheets exists even when you were the one who designed and built the spreadsheet.

Microsoft Excel does come with some basic functionality to help users navigate through a spreadsheets formulas. Some common methods are:

– Utilising the ‘Go To’ window [ctrl + G] and typing in cell addresses

– Entering edit mode [F2], thus outlining same sheet precedents in different colors

– Using formula auditing to draw arrows to precedent or dependent cells and double clicking to move back and forth between same sheet references and the ‘Go To’ window to move back and forth between off-sheet references.

This functionality and all of the inefficiency of double mouse clicks falls well short of the mark for many users who have large complex spreadsheets, such as a financial model with formulas that link to a number of cells or cells much further down/across the sheet or to cells on a variety of other worksheets, or even workbooks. The bottom line is that when it comes to formula navigation the existing functionality of Microsoft Excel is difficult to use, inefficient and lacking in functionality.

The main problem is that when trying to check or understand a formula you must first take a look at the precedents cells or ranges, but then be able to quickly jump to the other precedent cells and finally back to the original formula you were originally looking at. Navigating to these precedents and then back again using Microsoft Excel’s existing functionality is time consuming to say the least as many have felt the frustration of editing, checking, de-bugging, enhancing or auditing a formula that you, or worse, someone else has created in their spreadsheet when multiple precedents and sheets are involved.

This common complaint with Microsoft Excel is heard time and time again by engineers, accountants, management consultants, bankers and finance professionals who work with Excel spreadsheets on a daily basis. Many spreadsheet users including financial modellers (who seem to be leading the charge) are turning towards Excel Add-ins and software tools that plug into Microsoft Excel to help them navigate through formulas and complex spreadsheets more easily.

Probably the most popular and widely used Excel add-in for this purpose is ‘Formula Navigator’. An add-in created by the company ‘Spreadsheet Guys’. They have developed a unique add-in utilising a re-sizeable floating window and hyperlink system to help Excel users understand a formula and efficiently jump to all of its precedent and dependent cells and ranges no matter whether they are on a different worksheet or a different open workbook. An additional history window added as part of the products 2nd release also allows the user to click back to any cell previously looked at (traced) using the tool, during the current open session.

Whether the spreadsheet was designed by you or someone else, ‘Formula Navigator’ definitely fills a need and has already cured the frustration of many Excel spreadsheet users, helping them to more quickly understand the logic in a formula and links between sheets, thus helping to reduce spreadsheet errors, facilitate debugging and assist with spreadsheet auditing.