Excel’s PivotTables and PivotCharts features have long been admired by the historically small community that made use of them, but Microsoft has made great efforts in the 2007 release of Microsoft Office to expose them and make them more evident to users. PivotTables Recipes, this book, will enable users to take real-world scenarios from the author, customize the PivotTables and supporting code around them, and use them directly in their work. Ultimate convenience for the reader on a feature which is familiar by name and interesting to many but with which few users have experience.
I'm Debra Dalgleish, the owner and lead consultant at Contextures, a consulting firm located in Mississauga, Ontario, Canada, specializing in Microsoft Office programming and development, and serving local and international clients.
My website -- www.contextures.com -- is packed with Excel tips, Excel tutorials, and Excel video tutorials, like the one shown here.
My Excel blog -- blog.contextures.com -- features Excel tips and tricks, and a few related topics.
My pivot table blog -- www.pivot-table.com -- has Excel pivot table tips and tutorials.
I've written three books on Excel pivot tables, available here at Amazon:
* Beginning Pivot Tables in Excel 2007
* Excel 2007 Pivot Tables Recipes
* Excel Pivot Tables Recipe Book
Self-employed since 1985, I started by doing word processing on a Macintosh (upgraded to 512K), with an external floppy drive, and no hard drive. The first two programs that I used were MacPaint and MacWrite. Soon I got MultiPlan and Microsoft Word, and was excited by all the new things they could do.
The next big program I got was Excel, and I expanded my business into that area. In the mid 90s, when Windows 3.1 was released, I gradually switched to a PC, because that's what my clients were using. I did computer training, wrote training manuals, continued with word processing, and created spreadsheets.
In 1996 I was asked to teach an introductory course in Access 2.0, so I learned that too. At the end of that year I created my first database for a client. Since then, we've converted the database to newer versions, but it's still going strong!
Currently my work load is about 40% Excel programming, 40% Access development, and 20% other Microsoft Office projects, such as Word and PowerPoint. A few clients still use Office 2000, a few have upgraded to Office 2007, and the rest use Office XP or Office 2003.
