Excel 97 Annoyances (Nutshell Handbooks) [Paperback]

Lee Hudspeth (Author), Timothy-James Lee (Author), Woody Leonhard (Author)

Book Description

Series: Nutshell Handbooks | Publication Date: September 8, 1997

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.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Lee Hudspeth is a co-founder of PRIME Consulting Group, Inc. (Hermosa Beach, CA), a Microsoft Solution Provider. His background is in operations research, financial analysis, and marketing analysis (formerly with Unocal Corp.). He has coauthored several books on Office, including The Underground Guide to Microsoft Office, OLE, and VBA and The Underground Guide to Excel 5.0 for Windows. He is co-editor-in-chief of the monthly newsletter Woody's Underground Office. He's a Microsoft MVP (Most Valued Professional), coauthor of the Microsoft course on application development using WordBasic, and a certified Microsoft trainer in Visual Basic and WordBasic. Along with other PRIME Consulting staff, Lee has developed innumerable lines of VB, VBA, and WordBasic code for the firm's numerous Office add-ins (PRIME for Excel and PRIME for Word), going way back to Word 2.0. Lee also writes and delivers Office usage and development custom courses to hordes of interested parties the world over.

T.J. Lee, a co-founder of PRIME Consulting Group, has a background as a certified public accountant and has done computer and management consulting for years. He has coauthored several books on Office, including The Underground Guide to Microsoft Excel 5 and The Underground Guide to Microsoft Office, OLE and VBA. T.J. is co-editor-in-chief of the monthly newsletter Woody's Underground Office and a certified Microsoft trainer. He has written countless courseware packages and manuals, coauthored the Microsoft Education Services course on Developing Applications in Word, and taught and lectured for thousands of developers and end users.

Woody Leonhard's books include Windows 3.1 Programming for Mere Mortals, The Underground Guide to Word for Windows, The Hacker's Guide to Word for Windows, The Mother of All PC Books, The Mother of All Windows 95 Books, and several others. He was series editor for Addison-Wesley's Underground Guides (11 books) and A-W's Hacker's Guides (4 books). Along with T.J. Lee and Lee Hudspeth he's editor-in-chief of PC Computing's Undocumented Office, a monthly hardcopy newsletter. He's a contributing editor at PC Computing (circulation 1,000,000+), and productivity editor for Office Computing (circulation 400,000), a new monthly magazine from the editors of PC Computing. He also publishes a free weekly electronic news bulletin on Microsoft Office called WOW (Woody's Office Watch), available by sending email to [e-mail]. Woody's software company makes WOPR (Woody's Office POWER Pack), the number-one enhancement to Microsoft Office. A self-described "grizzled computer hack, frustrated novelist and Office victim," by day he's a Tibetan human rights activist and co-founder of the Tibetan Children's Fund. Woody lives on top of a mountain in Coal Creek Canyon, Colorado.

Product Details

• Paperback: 350 pages
• Publisher: O'Reilly Media; 1st ed edition (September 8, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 156592309X
• ISBN-13: 978-1565923096
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6.1 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #588,777 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Lots of Tips, July 11, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Excel 97 Annoyances (Nutshell Handbooks) (Paperback)

This book is useful in describing many odds and ends of using EXCEL. This book is not an overall introduction, like Running Microsoft EXCEL 97, nor a series of examples, like EXCEL for Scientists and Engineers. Rather, it is a helpful handholder to assist you in setting up the program and operating it to suit yourself. Like its companion volume, WORD 97 Annoyances, the theme of the book is to put VBA to use in customizing the program to your own tastes. However, the main love of the authors is WORD, and there are fewer VBA fixes in this book than in the WORD 97 book. There also are large scale repetitions of whole sections of the WORD book in this book.

Nonetheless there are a number of useful examples of using VBA in EXCEL, of setting up menus and rearranging toolbars etc. There also are some good points about spreadsheet organization, checking for spreadsheet errors, and precautions to be taken against crashes, viruses, and misuse of macros.

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Not the standard set by Word Annoyances, July 14, 1998

By 

johare4 (Santa Fe, NM) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Excel 97 Annoyances (Nutshell Handbooks) (Paperback)

The idea is the same as WORD Annoyances--to provide VBA workarounds to tailor operation to your own tastes. However, not nearly as many workarounds are provided as in the WORD Annoyances book. Also, large sections are copied verbatim. For example, the introductory VBA examples are the same as WORD Annoyances, although there are a few EXCEL specific VBA programs as well. The discussion of worksheet auditing (tracking down mistakes in entries) and organization of worksheets inside a workbook is better than most.

3 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Best Excel book I have read; funny, critical, informative., May 20, 1998

By 

[e-mail] (Santa Monica, CA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Excel 97 Annoyances (Nutshell Handbooks) (Paperback)

In 1995 I read a book entitled "The Underground Guide to Excel 5.0" by Lee Hudspeth and T.J. Lee. I read it from cover to cover. Since then I have been searching for more from these guy and I finally found it in "Excel 97 Annoyances." Unlike most computer books, which are rehashes of the user manual, "Excel 97 Annoyances" has "soul." It is a funny, irreverent, critical look at Excel. This is a unique book, full of useful tips and techniques. Read it and you'll have more fun learning about Excel than you ever could have imagined.