Excel Hacks: 100 Industrial-Strength Tips and Tools
The spreadsheet is the software tool that turns everyone into a hacker by making it possible to play with numbers easily.Excel Hacks, therefore, makes a lot of sense. This small, fact-dense book explains how to get maximum utility from Microsoft's popular calculation application. It shows how to use all the stuff you know is in there but have never bothered to figure out (dynamic cell ranges, PivotTables, macros), and how to carry out particularly hasslesome calculations (notably those involving dates). The coverage is all the more succinct because the authors didn't feel obligated (thankfully) to include the ponderous basics of Excel--the details of formatting and simple calculation that fill up pages and pages of more typical Excel guides.The Hawleys' treatment of PivotTables is typical of their approach to Excel. The authors explain this powerful statistical analysis feature with a series of four recipes (called "hacks") that go from straight documentation of the feature (how to create an unadorned PivotTable) to more complicated tricks involving Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) as it applies to PivotTables. They provide some background information along the way, but the main focus of the hacks is procedural: Follow along with the text and you'll see your spreadsheets do new tricks. You'll also understand what's going on, so you'll be better able to modify the procedures to suit your own requirements.--David WallTopics covered: How to use the most powerful and least-understood features of Microsoft Excel (versions 2000 and later) for Windows and Mac OS. Sections address data lookups, statistical calculations, charting, macros, and general tricks for enhanced efficiency.