Excel Hacks: 100 Industrial-Strength Tips and Tools
- Author : Raina Hawley, David Hawley
- Paperback: 304 pages
- Publisher: O'Reilly Media; 1st Edition edition (March 1, 2004)
- Language: English
- ISBN: 059600625X
- Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6.0 x 0.7 inches
If you think that getting creative with Excel means the underhanded tweaking of numbers, think again. Excel Hacks shows even the most experienced users how to do things with Excel they might never have thought of doing--and lets them have a little fun while they're at it. Microsoft Excel is not just the dominant spreadsheet in the world; it's also one of the most popular applications ever created. Its success lies not only in its power and flexibility, but also in its streamlined, familiar interface that casually conceals its considerable capabilities. You don't need to know everything that Excel can do in order to use it effectively, but if you're like the millions of Excel power users looking to improve productivity, then Excel Hacks will show you a wide variety of Excel tasks you can put to use, most of which are off the beaten path. With this book, Excel power users can bring a hacker's creative approach to both common and uncommon Excel topics--"hackers" in this sense being those who like to tinker with technology to improve it. The "100 Industrial Strength Tips and Tools" in Excel Hacks include little known "backdoor" adjustments for everything from reducing workbook and worksheet frustration to hacking built-in features such as pivot tables, charts, formulas and functions, and even the macro language. This resourceful roll-up-your-sleeves guide is for intermediate to advanced Excel users eager to explore new ways to make Excel do things--from data analysis to worksheet management to import/export--that you never thought possible. Excel Hacks will help you increase productivity with Excel and give you hours of "hacking" enjoyment along the way.
Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com
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 Wall
Spotlight Reviews :
>> Reviewer: Bruce J. Kratofil (Cleveland, OH)
Microsoft Excel is an extremely powerful tool. Yet most users have only scratched the surface of its power, using only a small part of its capabilities.
Excel Hacks: 100 Industrial-Strength Tips & Tools by David & Raina Hawley, shows readers how to do more, and how to do things better, with the market-leading spreadsheet. The word "hack" here refers to its original meaning in computers. A hack was either a "quick and dirty solution" or a "clever way of doing things", and didn't refer to breaking into systems. This book presents 100 different hacks spread over eight categories, covering the basics; built-in features; naming hacks; pivot tables; charts; formulas and functions; macros; and connecting Excel to the rest of the world.
Individually, none of these hacks may cause you to run down the street shouting "Eureka", but together they should help just about every Excel user. I consider myself an expert user, working with spreadsheets for over twenty years and teaching classes in Excel and 1-2-3, yet I was still able to learn a lot from this book. In some cases, it was genuinely new information (Hack #50, Explode a Single Slice from a Pie Chart or Hack #99, Access SOAP Web Services from Excel). In other cases, it showed how to use a tool I knew about in some different way (Hack #41, Create Custom Functions Using Names or Hack #78, Construct Mega-Formulas). A couple of times, it served as a reminder to use some tool that I had been neglecting (Hack #6, Customize the Template Dialog and Default Workbook).
Some of the hacks are usability tips, showing how other tools (such as pivot tables) will be more useful if you lay out data in a certain way. Several tips help if you develop spreadsheets for others to use, limiting their capacity to screw things up. Sometimes, the hacks may just spur you to further thought, making you think "Gee, if you can use this tool to do this, maybe with just a little more work I can get it do that!"
The hacks are self-contained, so you don't have to read the book cover-to-cover. If a particular topic doesn't interest you, it won't hurt to jump ahead, or even skip a particular chapter. You don't need to type in long, complicated listings either. You can download the sample code for all the hacks from the authors' website. The authors do Excel training and application work in western Australia, and their website is crammed with more Excel material.
Who should read this book? The ideal audience is the broad middle class of Excel users. You shouldn't give it to a beginner, because they are still learning about the forest while this book looks at individual trees. Super power users, who may know ninety of these hacks already, won't get that much of it either, but they should be writing the books, not reading them. But for everyone in between, the book is sure to teach something you didn't know about Excel.
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>> Reviewer: Mary Ann Hartzog (Chugiak, AK USA)
This book is full of amazing tricks and shortcuts that one can use to customize workbooks and make them more user friendly and visually appealing.
The book is designed to be useful to both Macintosh and PC users. The writing style is easy to understand and uses step-by-step instructions. Therer are many helpful illustrations.
The hacks are rated for difficulty: Beginner, Moderate and Expert, and groups of hacks are organized into chapters.
Hack #1 is rated as Beginner. This hacks allows the user to view multiple workbooks on the screen simultaneously and also how to change the layout style of the workbooks viewed. The Excel user can then choose a method of viewing multiple workbooks best suited to his or her needs.
Hack #3, rated as a Moderate hack, is entitled "Prevent Users from Performing Certain Actions." This hack protects Excel workbooks from changes. The creator can protect his or her workbooks from being copied with the Save As. . .command, prevent the user from printing a workbook and prevent users from inserting more worksheets.
Hack #57 is an example of an Expert hack. "Create A Speedometer Chart" seems to be one of the more elaborate hacks in the book. It enables the user to create a circular chart with a moving needle by first compiling data in a worksheet and then using the Chart Wizard to combine doughnut and pie charts. The user can then create a unique chart that isn't offered by the Chart Wizard. The speedometer needle will move when a scrollbar is activated by the user.
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