Customer Reviews

Excel 2007: The Missing Manual

5 star:		(20)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

An easy to read and easy to understand manual. The Tip Paragraphs are very helpful. I really like the examples and the illustrations.
The extensive sections on Formulas and Macros really makes this book powerful and invaluable.
Althought the manual does not come with a CD, many examples and downloads are available online.
I recommend this to any Excel 2007 user.

Excel 2007 Missing Manual is a very good book that serves as a valuable resource for beginning as well as intermediate users. The author does a good job of reviewing the improvements of 2007 as well as exploring many uses of the program. However, Excel 2007 Bible covered a tad more information, hence, the 4 star review for this book. Though I must admit that this is still a very good resource for beginner's as well as intermediate users.

Based on the above listed reviews, mine is going to be short and sweet. This is a book to have if you need to get up-to-speed with the new version of Excel. MS Excel is a de-facto standard in spreadsheet software, whether you like it or not. This book will take you from A to Z on the subject of Excel 2007. It provides real-life examples to real-life questions. There may be more simple books out there on the topic, but O'Reilly is my choice. 5 stars.

I love these Missing Manuals for Excel. The descriptions are written in a clear conversational tone, and the examples are easy to follow. I use Excel for basic list and schedule making, to type notes for college, to calculate statistics for my tennis team, and for different finance calculations and reports at work. Sometimes the help function that comes with Excel is sufficient for quick questions, but for more complicated use and/or plainer explanations, I prefer the book to the help function. I have the manuals for both Excel 2003 and 2007, and the manuals are not interchangeable for the two versions. Whichever version of Excel you use, whether you want to look up basic how-to's, do complicated computations, or get into the bells and whistles, I would recommend the Missing Manual.

Just like the cover says... "The book that should have been in the box." Most people only take advantage of about 2% of Excel's power. If you want to do more that add and subtract and would like to see Excel do truly amazing things, you must have this book. I'll never understand why MicroSoft spends so much time building such a feature rich program as Excel and refuses to publish a guide because these things just ought to be intuitave. They are not only non intuitive but many of the more powerful features are actually hidden. The secrets will be revealed with The Missing Manual.

Pro: This is the third Missing Manual book I've bought. The thing I appreciate most about all the Missing Manual books is the rigorous QA that ensures the reader will not be frustrated by errors. This is a clear, easy-to-follow, informative book. I highly recommend it.

Con: The book's "Get Satisfaction" feedback website is poor. I was not able to leave a suggestion there, so I'll put in here.

These are my suggestions: 1) Replace "Get Satisfaction" with a better feedback tool and 2) in the file name of "Missing CD" files, include a reference to the figure in the book. That will make it easier to use the CD examples along with studying the book.

This is great for tips and special uses. It is also great for people upgrading from older versions of Office to find out where things have moved or how they are done in 2007.

I didn't want to waste my time trying to learn the new Excel 2007 by trial and error and only being able to use a few features. After reading this book for a couple of weeks I'm starting feel like an expert user. I highly recommend this product.

Title: Excel 2007: The Missing Manual
By Matthew MacDonald
First Edition: December 2006
Series: The Missing Manuals
ISBN 10: 0-596-52759-4
ISBN 13: 9780596527594
Pages: 856
The introduction tells in general about the "hot additions":
Fewer limits
Faster speeds
Better looking charts
Formula AutoComplete
Tables
Easier (and prettier) conditional formatting
Easier (and prettier) pivot tables
Save as PDF: available as a free download, not actually in Excel 2007
This book is heavy reading. After a few paragraphs of light introduction, each sentence is packed with actions to take, issues to ponder, tables to study, and much more. The actions to take could not be done in one night. Look forward to a week, at least.
This book is light reading. The style is light and easy to enjoy. The author is definitely a wordsmith and has total control over the tone of the book. Some of the chapters start with non issues to people interested in Excel, but this seems to be his writing style: a neutral or buffered start so you do not bolt before you get into that chapter.
I liked the following chapters quite a bit:
Chapter 27 Automating tasks with macros
Chapter 28 Programming spreadsheets with visual basic

Part Six was the best

Chapter 22 Protecting your workbooks
Chapter 23 Worksheet collaboration
Chapter 24 Querying databases and XML Files
Chapter 25 Exchanging Data with other programs
Chapters 24 and 25 were the very best in the book, depending on whether you were more interested in querying databases or exchanging data.

This book is worth 5 stars and every penny charged for it, taking everything into account. A balanced point of view is being used by the author in parts of the text. Well done.

I really like Excel 2007 and find it to be an impressive spreadsheet.

Frederick J Eccher Jr
MBA
M.S. Management of Information Systems
A.B. Psychology
B.A. Biology
CIO, Community Partners
President, Board of Directors, Saint Louis Visual Basic Users Group
rick@stlvbug.net

I've been an Office user for many, many years, but Microsoft keeps adding what they consider to be features and with Office 2007, they changed the User Interface.

The Missing Manuals series are generally excellent, so I bought all of the volumes available covering Office 2007 for use as references when I needed them.

As it happens, with Office 2010 just becoming available, I needed a reference to Excel 2007 immediately - and my volume of Excel 2007:The Missing Manual was at hand.

Lifesaver. I needed a crash course in Pivot Tables and that is precisely what I got. More than enough to carry me through the basics in a flash.

I also had to review the book's treatment of Excel functions. I was trying to do some data manipulation. Normally I would just write a program to do this, but this project was a bit bigger and I wanted to take care of all that needed to be done in a single app.

The first seven chapters deal with the basics and then some of spreadsheets. For beginners, this is must-read material. More experienced users will probably be okay with just skimming it. The next 21 chapters bring the reader deeper and deeper into Excel's very great capabilities. This is not one of those books where the reader is constantly told that the subject at hand is beyond the scope of the book. The author's provide very substantial detail, but their writing style is crisp and clear, free of pedantry, It is actually pleasant to read, despite being a technical manual.

As I said, this book has been sitting on the shelf, having been purchased as a reference for the moment I would need an authoritative education on some aspect of Excel 2007 in a hurry.

Thanks to being well researched, well written and amply supplied with illustrations and examples, the book saved me.

What more can you ask?

Jerry