Customer Reviews

Excel Charts

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

I must often prepare simple visuals from complex data, aiming to communicate the message in the data at a glance from the audience. This book is an excellent reference for how to easily set up Excel charts to do just that. Chapter 8: Charting Techniques and Tricks is especially valuable and I refer to it all the time. I recommend this as a desktop reference for anyone who creates charts in Excel.

One of the most helpful books I have ever used when battling with making the graphs look just the way I need them. It's amazing what you can do with the help of John's expertise.

Being an experienced Excel user, I was surprised to learn a few helpful tips in the 1st chapter alone (which I was planning to skip as it is just the basics). I was hoping for more examples of really effective, professional chart designs. There are some, but not too many that knock your socks off.

I liked this book a lot. The instructions are very easy to read as are all of Mr. Walkenbach's books. I own a few and I like them very much.

If you ever wondered, How'd they do that? This book goes behind the scenes of creating those professional looking charts your colleagues will envy. If I were to plot this book on the X and Y axis, one being cool, and the other being useful, this is a good balance between the two with a majority of the r values along a very focused positive line. (sorry, nerd joke)

This book is solely dedicated to creating those eye catching charts that people (guys, being a visual animal) really dig. It does what it is supposed to do in that it focuses nearly all the content of the book on creating those little jems. This is one of those books that you will want to accompany all those other Excel books you will want around as a reference. This is definitely for the medium to advanced level user. I would recommend that this book be one of three or Four. Others to complete the set would be:

Excel 2003 Formulas by John Walkenbach
Excel Data Analysis: Your Visual Blueprint for Creating and Analyzing Data, Charts and PivotTables by Jinjer Simon and Jinjer Simon
and
Microsoft Excel Data Analysis and Business Modeling by Wayne L. Winston

Excel charts is a very good learning source for creating charts in Excel. However, the files that are on the CD is the solution files. If the author could make a set of files that are the initial files for going through the chapters and refer to the filenames in the book, it is a perfect book for learning Excel charts.

This is an outstanding book, it's an easy study format, some repetition but far from the novel format found in other books and it touches' on all the core principles required for good spreadsheet design.

I was hoping that walkenbach would resolve some of the worse convoluted excel specific issues like pivot tables and copy paste bugs but some things are simply never going to be fixed.

The books provides a real core foundation to formulas, structure, and logic required by anyone who is a novice and/or professional, the information is laid out very well and the structure makes referring to this book a joy.

It is in my opinion the BEST Excel 2003 book I have ever had; it also covers some old structures that Excel brought over from Lotus!

I own two copies!, I know the first one is getting ragged already from use so I am prepared, if I sale snatch it up!, its good reads...

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