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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

Almost everyone these days use spreadsheet in their daily life, whether it is at work or at home or at school.

However, many are also just using it for its basic function, without knowing or exploring other functions and features that are available in spreadsheets, like Microsoft Excel.

Some are too afraid to ask others as they may look stupid for not knowing.

Others may want to read up on the additional functions and features, but the amount of books available and the thickness of these books tend to scare them away.

What I will do in this series of tips on “Effective use of spreadsheets” I will explain useful features in Microsoft Excel, which would make working with spreadsheets easier, whether you use spreadsheets for serious applications in the office or to catalogue your DVD collection or to keep your favourite recipes.

One feature that I have found to be very useful, especially if you have a large number of spreadsheets to work on or refer to frequently, is Indexing Your Spreadsheets by using the HYPERLINK Function.

When you have 10 or 50 or 100 spreadsheet in your workbook, you may find locating a particular spreadsheet by scrolling through the sheet tab at the bottom of the spreadsheet as being very difficult and time consuming.

The best way to locate find fast and accurately is to create your Spreadsheet Number 1 as an INDEX SPREADSHEET for the whole Workbook.

Try this out.

1) Open a New Spreadsheet File

2) On Row 1 Column A (location A1) type in Customer or Recipe A

3) Right click on A1 and scroll down to HYPERLINK and click on it

4) Select Place in this document on the left hand side

5) Select Sheet 2 from the list Cell Reference

6) Press OK You have now referenced Cell A1 in Sheet 1 to Cell A1 in Sheet 2

You should now see Customer A in Cell A1 Sheet 1 with a Hyperlink underline to it.

When you place your cursor over A1 in Sheet 1 and click there, it will take you straight to Sheet 2

7) Now do the same on Cell A1 in Sheet 2 but now reference to Sheet 1 to take you back to Sheet 1 (the Index)

Repeat Steps 1 to 7 for a few more spreadsheets, say about 5 or 6 more, for Customer B or Recipe B onwards and then see the results.

Great isn’t it.

Now you have just created a link through an Index Spreadsheet and a link to go back to the Index in every Spreadsheet.

Have fun trying it out and using it EFFECTIVELY in your daily work.

Looking after domestic finances can cause much anxiety. Often you are anxious because you find it difficult to keep track of your finances and so do not feel you are in control. Using Microsoft Excel to record, monitor and control your domestic finances can go a long way to removing this anxiety. Some effort is required at the beginning to set up the systems but this is soon rewarded by providing you with a great time and labour saving device, which can also help you save money and stay in control of your finances.

Home Maintenance
It can be very difficult to keep track of the maintenance requirements in the home, who can remember exactly when the boiler was last serviced for example. Microsoft Excel has the facilities to allow you to produce a home maintenance schedule to make keeping track of maintenance issues much easier. Each item that requires inspection can be listed, together with a schedule of how often they require checking. Simple functions are available in Excel to allow items that are overdue to be flagged for attention, for example by changing the colour to red if the inspection date has been missed. It is also very simple to add notes recording what the issues where the last time the item was inspected. The cost of any work done can also be recorded, which will help to highlight when it would be more economic to replace items rather than continue to repair them.

Household Budget
Keeping track of the household finances can be a daunting task. As well as the basic calculation functions Microsoft Excel contains simple formulas which will automatically update the results of your calculations when values change. Revising a value once the total has been calculated is simple, just make the change and Excel updates the total for you. There are also simple functions to allow you to add values, calculate averages and find the smallest or largest values in a range of values. You can use these functions to develop spreadsheets to keep track of all your incoming and outgoing payments, putting in predicted values of bills for budgeting purposes that can then be easily updated when the actual bill arrives. This allows you to keep track of your balance and helps you identify when there is likely to be a shortfall, giving you time to put measures in place to prevent charges being incurred.

Tax Returns
Filling in your tax return can be a long and drawn out business. Even if you send your return off to be completed by someone else you can make things significantly easier by keeping track of expenses during the year. Having a household budget spreadsheet at your fingertips makes it much simpler to record expenses and document the corresponding receipts, which you need to have to hand at tax return time.

Home Improvements
You can also use Microsoft Excel to help in planning and monitoring any home improvements. The first, and ultimately most important point to consider when starting such a venture is how much it is going to cost you. An Excel spreadsheet is a great tool for tracking expenses. You can use the spreadsheet to help you plan the works, develop a preliminary budget, record your actual expenses and compare them to each other. In this way if things are starting to go over budget you should be able to spot it early and use the spreadsheet to review your options to get it back on track.

The above points illustrate just a few of the many ways in which Microsoft Excel can be used to simplify many domestic finance tasks. By applying some or all of these measures you should feel more in control of the situation. You should also be able to save both time and money in completing your household duties, leaving you more time and money for the more enjoyable things in life!

When Microsoft Excel is used to manipulate, store and analyse data it can become extremely difficult to manage, let alone efficiently work to produce any meaningful insights. This is because with data sets large and small, the data must be meaningful, logical, structured, internally consistent and clean. This holds true regardless of whether the data has been imported into excel from another system or manually entered.

In this computing age, most people know that for any data set to be useable it must first be relatively structured and clean. A spreadsheet and its table layout naturally encourages data to be somewhat structured, however ensuring data is clean is also difficult.

As a set of general rules data is most useful when things like text fields hold only names as well as meaningful and validated codes, categories and classifications. Text notes and other free form text should be isolated to a dedicated notes field and thus separated from other numeric data. Numeric fields should hold only numeric values (numbers, dates, %’s and in the correct quantum or magnitude with no text prefixes, suffixes, spaces, text elements or text notes present. You must also be careful that numeric data is not stored as text and it should be internally consistent in terms of the correct format so that it can be used in calculations or for comparison and queries. Finally, addresses should be separated out into multiple fields such as street address, town /suburb, state / province, postal code and country to allow for geographic analysis and mail outs if required.

Fixing up a data set to meet these criteria is called data scrubbing, cleansing or massaging. This data cleansing process can be very time consuming even for an experienced Microsoft Excel user, database engineer, business analyst or computer programmer.

So why does data that inevitably finds its way into a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet often suffer from the problems outlined above. The reasons are many. If the data is imported, it may have been sourced from a combination of other spreadsheets, databases, systems, reports, word documents, emails or web pages. If the data has been entered manually it may have been poorly done so by an inexperienced computer users such as administrative or junior staff with a lack of understanding for data structures. Excel is easy to use and widely accessible, so an inexperienced colleague can quite easily update your spreadsheet with a false sense of confidence and inadvertently enter new data incorrectly. And finally, unlike a fully functional software system, data entry in Excel generally has no automatic validating rules, unless carefully setup by the spreadsheet’s creator.

Whilst Excel cannot clean or structure all of your data for you it does come with some useful functionality for manipulating and analysing clean and structured data sets. This in-built functionality includes pivot tables, sorting and filtering.

Filtering alone is a powerful tool and can help to quickly isolate data based on specified criteria. But what happens if your data is clean but not very structured (a common problem). For instance what if you, a client or your team is using colours, fonts or some kind of formatting to classify data in an Excel spreadsheet. In short, you wont be able to filter the data, because Excel’s in-built filtering logic requires rules based on numbers, dates and text only. It will not perform filtering based on formats. In addition Excel filtering only applies down rows. It will not perform filtering across columns.

These common complaints with Microsoft Excel filtering are heard time and time again by engineers, accountants, management consultants, bankers and finance professionals who work with data in 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 improve the in-built filtering logic of Microsoft Excel and thus analyse certain data sets quickly and easily.

Probably the most popular and widely used Excel add-in for this purpose is ‘Filter by Format. An add-in created by the company ‘Spreadsheet Guys’. They have developed a unique add-in which allows for filtering down rows and across columns based on one or more formatting criteria of a target cell within the data range.

If you want to filter based on colours and fonts, or finally filter across columns then ‘Filter by Format’ definitely fills a need and has already cured the frustrations of many Excel spreadsheet users, helping them to more quickly filter data which has been classified using formatting, thus helping them to slice, dice and analyse data in their Excel Spreadsheets.

• ISBN13: 9780470044018
• Condition: USED – VERY GOOD
• Notes:

Product Description
This book is a single reference that’s indispensable for Excel beginners, intermediate users, power users, and would-be power users everywhere Fully updated for the new release, this latest edition provides comprehensive, soup-to-nuts coverage, delivering over 900 pages of Excel tips, tricks, and techniques readers won’t find anywhere else John Walkenbach, aka “Mr. Spreadsheet,” is one of the world’s leading authorities on Excel Thoroughly… More >>

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