Excel Charts (Paperback)

~ (Author) "WHEN MOST PEOPLE THINK OF A spreadsheet product such as Excel, they think of crunching rows and columns of numbers..." (more)
Key Phrases: Chart Wizard, Jan Feb Mar, Format Axis (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Review

"...a unique, accessible book that conveys a lot of powerful thoughts which can be turned into a great success through careful application..." (M2 Best Books, 26 February 2003)

Product Description

* One of the world's best-known Excel experts shows how to master the charting features in Excel 2000 and 2002 to create compelling graphic representations of data
* Covers basic and advanced features, focusing on the new charting featuresprovided in version 2002
* Explains how to select charts for different categories of data, modify data in a chart, deal with missing data, format charts, customize shapes, and give charts a professional look

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Product Details

• Paperback: 552 pages
• Publisher: Wiley (November 5, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0764517643
• ISBN-13: 978-0764517648
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 7.4 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (15 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #311,604 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

51 of 54 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent, December 17, 2002

By	Antonios Giannakas (New York, NY United States) - See all my reviews

If your objective is to master the Charting feature of Excel, I bet that this book will exceed your expectations. Although most the material is advanced every user could benefit (The first Chapter offers a nice introduction to Excel Charts for novices).
Knowledge of formulas and named formulas is necessary for certain examples in the second part of the book. You will be amazed of how many ways there are to customize and improve your charts, you will do things that you never thought possible in Excel. Excel's help file and other books in Excel will never give you the tricks and the work-arounds that you will learn from Walkenbach's book. Some of the most interesting Chart Techniques are :
How to create combination Charts, how to Add a secondary axis,
How to put several Charts on the same Chart Sheet. Scrolling
charts, Self Expanding Charts. Adding Checkboxes to charts. Box
plot and How to plot Mathematical Functions in Excel.
I am sure that you will find many many more useful techniques.

68 of 77 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Errors, errors, May 19, 2003

By	johare "johare4" (Tucson, AZ United States) - See all my reviews

This book allots much space to stuff you find everywhere - what is a pivot table, for example - and on matters of conjecture and taste -does a pie chart "accurately" portray the data, for example. This space could be put to better use.

The section most interesting to me is Chapter 7 (30 pages) - Creating Interactive Charts. Unfortunately, there are errors. Some are only annoying, for example, on p. 213 telling us to enter Sheet1!Dates when the correct entry is =Sheet1!Date (plural is a typo, and no equals sign means no success). Simple errors, but I didn't like trial and error to discover the correct entry.

Other errors are tougher to fix, as on p. 228 where we are told to enter =N(OFFSET(Dates,(ROW(OFFSET($A$1 ... etc)) (I haven't filled in all the line). This procedure doesn't work at all, and an explanation of how it is supposed to work is "beyond the scope of the book". In trying to fix it, I found my own interactive graph that plots every N'th point and automatically adjusts to fit the selected data. Is a thank you in order?

What can you do? Walkenbach explains (p. 327) that changes to a pivot table chart that cause updating mean that all formatting is reverted to default. He also explains that pivot-table xy-charts are not possible, and that efforts to get around this basically are trouble. This may be the most useful part of this book: it tells you what can't be done.

Bottom Line: This book is padded and contains errors that consume much time.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Stuff I Never Knew, October 23, 2007

By	C. Elser (Kansas City, MO USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Amazon Verified Purchase

I've been using Excel to create charts for 20 years and thought I knew a lot about creating and modifying charts. I'm only on Chapter 4 and I've already learned a handful of very helpful hints and tips -- and this is just the chapters that cover the basics. I was planning to skip those chapters because I thought they wouldn't cover anything new. Instead I'm glad I didn't as there are a number of shortcuts I would have never known about. There are great examples and the CD lets you try out the options as they are discussed in the book.