Description
This book uncovers Excel 97's hard-to-find features and tells how to eliminate the annoyances of data analysis. It shows how to easily retrieve data from the Web, details step-by-step construction of a perfect toolbar, includes tips for working around the most annoying gotchas of auditing, and shows how to use VBA to control Excel in powerful ways.
Full Description
First, the good news: Microsoft Excel is a very powerful and popular spreadsheet program that has been around for quite some time. And this newest version, which ships with Office 97, is very robust and contains some great new features, including a 32,000 character limit per cell, support for the new IntelliMouse (which provides for better spreadsheet navigation), and reliable pivot tables.
Now the bad news: Excel is annoying. Often, the reason is that Excel is so feature-rich that it's hard to know how to access or use particular features efficiently. Since an Excel 97 worksheet supports 65,536 rows, how do you easily navigate from cell A1 to cell E6990, for instance? And how can you take advantage of Excel's powerful features when they're buried so deep in the Excel interface that you don't even know they're there?
Excel 97 Annoyances steps the reader through all of these and many other annoyances, showing how to eliminate them so the user can accomplish tasks easily and efficiently with Excel in order to get some real work done. Some of the topics covered in the book are:
- Construction of a perfect toolbar that reflects the way you work, and not the way Microsoft markets its software
- Techniques for taking full advantage of Excel's auditing features to prevent the ultimate annoyance: an incorrect spreadsheet
- How to effectively use Excel's Internet features
- How to use Excel's data validation features to insure users enter valid data into your spreadsheets
This book also introduces users to Visual Basic for Applications (VBA), illustrates how to use the VBA/Excel Editor, and shows how to use VBA to fight off many annoyances, by modifying Excel to work the way you want it to.
Excel 97 Annoyances is aimed at users who prefer to use Excel 97 in the most effective way possible. Spending a small amount of time following the tips in this book to eliminate annoyances will save countless hours when working with Excel.
Colophon
Our look is the result of reader comments, our own experimentation, and feedback from distribution channels. Distinctive covers complement our distinctive approach to technical topics, breathing personality and life into potentially dry subjects. The animal on the cover of Excel 97 Annoyances is a wild boar. The wild boar, a member of the family Suidae, is know for its sharp teeth, quick speed, intelligence, and keen sense of smell. The wild boar was first bred as a domestic animal about 9000 years ago. It is a very useful domesticated animal, as it provides humans with meat, leather, lard, and bristles for brushes, in addition to serving as a draft and riding animal.
The wild boar is the most widely distributed of all pigs, having been introduced to many regions of the Western hemisphere for sport hunting. While the natural inclination of the wild boar is to sleep at night, approximately 11 hours at a time, and search for food during the day, in heavily hunted areas boars will reverse this pattern. Like most species of pig, the wild boar eats a varied diet of grass, herbs, insects, small animals, and carrion. Wild boar are a nuisance to farming communities because their rooting damages the soil. Edie Freedman designed the cover of this book, using a 19th-century engraving from the Dover Pictorial Archive. The cover layout was produced with Quark XPress 3.3 using the ITC Garamond font.
The inside layout was designed by Edie Freedman and Nancy Priest and implemented in FrameMaker 5.0 by Mike Sierra. The text and heading fonts are ITC Garamond Light and Garamond Book. The illustrations that appear in the book were created in Macromedia Freehand 7.0 by Robert Romano. This colophon was written by Clairemarie Fisher O?Leary, with assistance from Kevin O?Leary.
