Anyone who uses Excel on a regular basis will find ways to get more out of the product and to improve their spreadsheets by reading this book.



I found some chapters to be of more interest than others, but that is a function of the type of work that I do. The examples for viewing large data sets were particularly helpful to me. I have long been frustrated at the amount of time that some of my Excel-based reports take to run because they relied heavily on constructs which are computationally intensive. After reading this book, I was inspired to rework a number of those reports using OFFSET as described by the author. That one change alone will save me hours of time staring at the screen watching the recalculation progress indicator. On the other hand, incorporating uncertainty into my models is a once-a-year type of need for me. If you need to (or should) incorporate uncertainty into your models, that chapter will get you started.



Which brings me to the frustrations of the book. In many instances, the author takes an approach of "I am going to make you aware of the possibilty that this can be done rather than show you in detail how to do it." This manifests itself either by directing you to more authoritative external sources in cases like the information on uncertainty or by giving you a very brief overview and then suggesting that you dig into the file on the accompanying CD. Browsing the files on the CD is very helpful. Still, I like to read in lots of situations where I don't have a PC handy. I would have liked more description in the text and less reliance on the CD.



Finally, this book commits a cardinal sin which is why I rate it only three stars. In order to view the sample spreadsheets, you need to run an installation program that copies them to your hard drive. These files are less than 30 MB, and they shoud be available as uncompressed files in a normal directory on the CD so they can be browsed at will. If you don't have administrator rights on your PC, you won't be able to look at the sample spreadsheets unless your IT department comes to run the installation routine. Not to mention that you end up also installing the author's add-in, which you may not want, and that by default the sample files get installed way down in the programs subdirectory. All of this is particularly irritating since the files are so necessary to getting value out of the text. Which raises a question for the author. Does this constitute a "best practice?" I don't think so.

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