Customer Reviews

Excel Hacks: Tips & Tools for Streamlining Your Spreadsheets

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This book could be titled "The Top 138 Excel Tips" book as well. The title seems to come from being a part of Oreilly's "Hack Series". The book is aranged roughly as 138 separate short chapters, one chapter per tip. Each tip is to the point and well explained. Samples, screenshots, and explanations accompany each tip. The tips are grouped into 8 actualy chapters that cover workbooks, built in features, naming, pivot tables, charts, formulas, macros and cross-application (such as Access integration). There are enough tips covered that different people will appreciate various parts of the book. It is not designed to be read cover to cover but to be indexed when trying to solve a problem in Excel. The titles of each tip are verbose enough that I can find what I am looking for by just scanning the table of contents rather than having to flip through the actual pages. This makes it easy to use and quicker; especially when I am at the computer and I just need to figure out how to do soemthing. I used tip #17 (validate data from a list on another worksheet) immediately to validate data being prep for posting to a database. Other tips were used within a few days so the book has already made itself useful in a short time.

I've been preparing financial and statistical models in Excel for about 13 years, and I found the Hawley's book to be well written and organized. Unlike 2004's Excel Hacks: 100 Industrial-Strength Tips and Tools, this book covers how you can use Excel 2007 more effectively.

Disclaimer: I'm not a fan of Excel 2007 and its new layout and shortcuts, but this book is more useful than anything I've come across.

Users of the Excel program who want to move from beginning to intermediate levels without hours of study will find this handbook of over a hundred 'hacks' invaluable, offering tools and resources perfect for handling information, worksheets, and data analysis tasks. Hack formulas and functions show how to use macros and other shortcuts to maximum effectiveness, making this a fine reference for not only college-level libraries strong in Excel resources, but for general interest lending collections where patrons use computers for business purposes.

Diane C. Donovan
California Bookwatch

Excel Hacks is extremely useful for anyone who works with MS Excel frequently. From the moment you open the book, or just page through it, you can pick up on so many useful tips that may not be apparent even in formal classes or after years of use. Having had both formal classes and spent years creating spreadsheets used in production environments, Excel Hacks has helped me improve my spreadsheet knowledge.

There are over 100 tips and tricks ranging from relatively simple for the novice user to reasonably complex for the power user. I've found myself going back to it again and again...and it's become the most dog-eared book on my shelf.

It does the best job of any book I've seen of truly explaining Pivot Tables as well as complex database functions.

Whether you're just getting started with Excel or whether you are a power-user (I generally fit into the power-user category), there is something for everyone!

I strongly recommend this book and give it my highest rating!

I consider myself an intermediate user of excel. This book gets pretty involved. A lot of nice tips and shortcuts. Also a good deal of macro-vba codes. It's a keeper.

Every time I open this book I find another solution to a common problem. Implementing them is always easy and the results never fail to impress.

Just days after receiving this book, a manager came into my office with a sticky Excel challenge. I thought I knew how to solve it but had forgotten. Using this book, in less than a minute we had the solution. Paid for the book plus on first use!

I bought Excel Hacks a couple of years ago. Loved it so much that when I saw that this one also included Excel 2007 I had to have it. This book shows you how to do things that you didn't know Excel could do. I have looked through these books about 6 times and every time I find something else I can use. I have even changed the code in some of them to meet my need. This book will also work for beginners as long as you type the code in exactly the way it is in the book.

I have the version which did not have the new added tips, so do not ask me how the newer edition is.
But the "old" edition is very, very good. It gave me many, many tips for solving problems I had with excel. And it helped me become the excel expert at my previous employer.

Do not use this book as a study guide, because it is not that. It contains hacks for several different types of problems.