Customer Reviews

Excel 2003 Formulas

5 star:		(16)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

I have this and the Excel 2003 Bible. Don't waste time on this. Go right for Excel Bible. This one seems to be a duplicate with only a small amount of expansion. Excel 2003 Bible will help you through a lot more problems.

Typically these technical how-to books are badly written and rushed to print and I found this one to be no exception. Although it offers some helpful hints not found in other Excel guides, it is rather wordy and vague in places. Some of the sample formulas simply do not work or else are not explained fully in context. Added to this, the accompanying CD skimps on the first four chapters, making it impossible to follow along on some the exercises the author provides. In some cases, he doesn't even provide a sample table. I went out and bought a copy of Microsoft's Excel Data Analysis and Business Modeling and find this to be better written, much more comprehensive, and easier on the wallet.

I use Excel non-stop for Bill Of Material (BOM) and pricing/cost analysis for manufacturing. This is by far the best publication available for the number crunching workhorse. I just find it peculiar that John decided to introduce "financial formulas" in Chapter 11. But seriously, it's loaded with boo-koos of real word examples that have made my work much more automated and easier.

I've found that some reviewers say that this book doesn't give enough theory or examples are trivial or you can find that all in the Help. However, I believe that only advanced Excel users might be dissatiafied with "Excel 2003 Formulas". While that's true that it's not overloaded with the advanced theory (which is what professionals look for), it does give the beginners or intermidiate users all they need to know about formulas, and the tips and tricks offered by Walkenbach really help to discover the world of Excel.
However, on the other hand if you're interested not only in formulas, but you're also planning to study the Excel as a whole then I would recommend to get the "Excel 2003 Bible" of this author. The reason is that the "Formulas..." for the most part just copy the "Bible..." which describes usage of the whole Excel and has a lot more information than the "Formulas".

I have enjoyed Excel 2003 Formulas, as I have been able to incorporate numerous examples into my spreadsheets at work, where I improved the quality of my work and streamlined my processes. It was well worth the investment for the text as it as paid for itself in the first week. The examples are straightforward and easy to understand. The chapters are well-organized.

Excel 2003 Formulas provides some amazing ways to really master Excel. Walkenbach's formulas are the best! He covers operators, naming techniques, debugging, auditing, developing custom VBA functions, array formulas, imported 1-2-3 files, etc. Oh, and the CD that comes with this one is load too!

Just an echo of previous reviewers. This is my third or fourth Walkenback Excel book - and they are all excellent. He provides more not-obvious tips and tricks than any other author - that truly impact the efficiency and usability of your spreadsheets. Great reference.

This is an eclectic collection of various recipies for Excel. This is a strange "lemmings" effect that it has such a high rating on Amazon.

The book is essentially a badly written cookbook as it does not provide underling mechanics and key ideas behind the Excel formulas. Chapters are more or less disconnected and most of them can be read in any order.

At the end the reader is left with very few good findings that probably are not worth the price of the book.

Pagecount is very deceptive -- considerable part of the book is fluff -- brainless reproduction of basic things that one can find in help and that is not worth even one dollar. Many examples are very trivial and not worth reading.

Tricks like Appendix B are simply disgusting -- the author just copied the listing of functions that has no practical value whatsoever just to inflate the pagecount.

Explanations mostly are extremely fuzzy. The author has real talent to make simple things complex and complex things impossible. Also this is just "do like I said" type of cookbook: the author never tries to explain concepts that are used (use of absolute adressing vs relative, the syntax intricacies of the second argument of countif and similar functions, etc)

Also the book suffers from frequent references to previous versions of Excel, which only distract the reader. One can assume that if the reader really wants to use one of the previous versions of Excel he can buy prev. edition of the book and save money.

In few places were things became more interesting they are also incomplete and/or incorrect (creation of your own VBA functions and collection of functions, usage of array functions like frequency, etc).

My impression is the author is just a book writer and does not have rich real world experience with Excel, the experience that is necessary to distinguish between important and trivial things.

As a result he cannot provide the reader any help in getting the grasp of underling architectural ideas, that are often very non-trivial (Excel is extremely powerful analytical tool disguised as a commodity spreadsheet).

I was very surprised and happy to find many formulae that Excel doesn't list in its catalog.

This book is great. It is divided into logical topics that address what I need to do my job on a daily basis. Easy to read, straight to the point. I highly recommend this book.