Customer Reviews

Special Edition Using Microsoft(R) Office Excel 2007

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

 

 

This book is only so-so as a guide to features, and definitely isn't aimed at engineers or technical types.

A simple example: suppose you want to change the cursor motion after Enter so the cursor stays put, instead of moving down to the next cell. Look under "Cursor" in the index -"Cursor" is not an entry. Look under the Chapter on Excel Options Dialog (the menu where this is adjusted). Cursor adjustment neither is mentioned nor is the menu to do it shown in any of the screen shots. Another example: suppose you want to find the Document Properties, like who is the author. Help tells you "Click the Office Button, point to Prepare, click on Properties". Jelen tells you nothing explicit, although he has a table p. 32 suggesting erroneously that you use menu View, Show/Hide, Properties. So, use Help, I guess.

There's more: suppose you want to change the label of a single data point on an xy-chart. The procedure, found by trial and error, is to select the chart, select the FORMAT tab under "Chart Tools" on the "ribbon", select the curve on the chart (click it), select the data point (click it), select "Format Selection" in the "Current Selection" window of the "ribbon". That extended process produces the same-old menu choices you used to get by selecting the point and making a right-click. Jelen doesn't tell you anything at all, and the Excel help is useless too.

More examples? If you want to use Goal Seek, the book tells you how to find it, but it does not tell you how to set Maximum Iterations and Maximum Change, two items often changed. To find that info, use Excel Help, a hit-and-miss thing at best. The book tells you how to install Solver, but fails to point out how to call it once installed. As typical of Excel books, there is no assessment of accuracy of Excel functions, nor the hazards of round-off errors.

By and large, guidance is erratic, and there's much blather about "jaw-dropping new Excel features". The Special Edition volume on Word 2007 is better organized, has a comprehensive index, and uses cross-references to advantage. Author Jelen should look at that book to see how much better things are done.

As a postscript, Jelen's five-page discussion of Assigning a Formula to a Name (p. 857-862) has several examples, while the "Inside Out" book has only a paragraph (p. 448). So there are topics that are better in Jelen.

Excel 2007 is a fairly major rewrite of the old Excel that we all came to know and love. The old Excel, whether it was Excel 97, 2000, XP, or 2003 was pretty much the same program. It had just about the same look and feel. To be sure Microsoft marketing made lots of smoke about the new features in each edition, but in reality there wasn't much fire behind that smoke. With Excel 2007 there are some significant changes - I mean, it's still a spread sheet, but but it's changed and improved in a number of ways. ==There are really two reasons for buying this book. One is that you're a newcommer to Excel. There must be a few people out there who are just starting out on Excel. This book has a fair amount of material aimed at you. It's probably not as basic as some books. It at lease presumes that you have some indication as to what a spreadsheet is nad does. ==The other reason is to be able to come up to date with the 2007 features, perhaps to use as part of your decision making process about upgrading or not. Here the book is excellent. In particular, its description of the new 'ribbon' feature is as good as or better than any I've seen. ==In general the book is organized with each thapter taking on a new subject. The beginning of each chapter is spent talking about the new 2007 features as they pertain to that particular chapter. ==All in all, here's everything there is to know in Excel 2007

In many ways this is a good book. I just don't feel that it's a good "learning" book.

For a person wanting to learn Excel 2007, this book's biggest flaw is the lack of hands-on exercises.

It does include some step-by-step examples, but they assume that the data already exists. This would have been okay had a CD been included, or the files were available on the Que site, but neither seemed to be the case. Therefore, I didn't find them terribly useful.

I would recommend that new Excel 2007 users look elsewhere. However, those making the transition from Excel 2003 might find this a fairly decent text.

No half stars so I'm stuck at 3 instead of 3 1/2...

I consider myself an intermediate level user of Excel. After upgrading to Excel 2007 from 2003, the new menu interface was confusing to me. I purchased the book to get pointers on the totally new menu "ribbon", as well as to learn more about pivot tables, lookups, and other advanced features of Excel 2007.

The book covered all of the topics that I was interested in learning more about, but did so in a manner that was very hard to follow. Even when I tried to work my way through some of the many specific examples, the directions seemed to be inconsistent. I found myself backing up to try and pick up what I "missed" over and over.

Even the general explanations on features, procedures, and functions were incoherent in many instances, with the author giving long, irrelevant histories of the way the task was done in previous versions (prior to Excel 2003), and interjecting his own opinions that took away from the "lesson" that was being described.

Perhaps it's just a clash between the authors style of writing and my way of processing information, but the book was of very little use to me. I also read the Word 2007 version of the series, and would highly recommend that volume. This manual is written in a completely different style that did not convey information in an effective manner.

I've been using Excel for close on to 20 years now - if you work in an office, you have no choice. People e-mail spreadsheets to you, ask you to fill them out/add to them, etc. I've noticed along the way that Excel is sort of the "power tool" of choice for Windows users - the tool they turn to the way I turn to, for example, awk & sed in Unix. In spite of its ubiquity, I had never really taken the plunge and made an effort to actually learn how to use it. This year, I finally broke down and decided to buy a book on Excel and see what I was missing.

I wish I had chosen a different book.

This book is not an introductory book on Excel, in spite of its packaging that implies that it is. The first part of the book is written for somebody who has quite a bit of experience with Excel and is now becoming accustomed to using the 2007 version. There's a lot of discussion about how, "if you used to do X in Excel 2003, you should now do Y in Excel 2007." Although I've dabbled with Excel in the past, most of this discussion was wasted on me - I'd rather just see how to do new and interesting things with the version for which I bought the book. Everything is eventually covered, but the organization is not for somebody who's new to Excel (or somebody like me, who's been muddling along for decades but wants a firm foundation in the tool).

For example, in chapter four, keyboard shortcuts were listed, but most of them were for functions that hadn't been presented yet; this list would have made a lot more sense in an appendix where it could be easily referenced later, after everything had been covered. Chapter 8 discusses how to "freeze" rows and columns without explaining what that is (you're assumed to already know, and you're assumed to already know how to have done this in a prior version of Excel). In chapter 9, he talks about using the F4 key in a formula to cycle between $B2, $B$2, B$2 and B2... however, he doesn't clarify what the difference is until chapter 20 (250 pages later).

The real value of the book is in the middle - the chapters on functions (this takes up about a third of the book). The chapter on financial functions mostly went over my head, but seemed authoritative - and since the two chapters on statistics and engineering functions were accurate and well done, I'll assume the author was as knowledgeable about financial functions as well. There were scattered minor errors such as "The [base 10] logarithm for 5,100 is somewhere between 2 and 3" (pg. 751), but there weren't too many of these and they didn't detract too terribly from the material. This whole section actually seems out of place with the rest of the book, as it covers everything from the ground up, rather than assuming that you're an Excel power user.

All in all, it's clear that this book is written for professional accountants who have already read at least one other introductory book on Excel and are just trying to familiarize themselves with what's new in Excel 2007. This is fine, and worthwhile - I just felt like I was misled by the advertising and the packaging that ought to have said "A guide to Excel 2007 for Excel 2003 experts". Page 386 makes this unequivocal when it states, "I understand that everyone reading this book believes that they know Excel formulas." Well, no... that's why I bought the book. The "fill handle" is mentioned several times but never explained. There are multiple mentions of "arrays" (distinct from ranges, which are also never defined, although the meaning of this is pretty clear), but the term is never clarified. I still don't know what he means by an "array" vs a "range". I think a range is a pair of cell names (e.g. B7:D11) and an array is a comma-separated list of ranges - but I can't be sure, since it's not explained. 20 pages of "Excel basics and terminology" would have been a HUGE help.

There are also several problems that a better proofreader ought to have caught. In a lot of places, the text doesn't match the application (for example, he calls the "Popular" tab "Personalize" in several places, and he refers the "Opulent" theme as "Deluxe"). What makes this frustrating is that the screenshots in the book *do* match Excel (but not the text of the book!) In other places, the screenshots don't match the application - "Comparing one worksheet to another" and "Highlighting an entire row" in chapter 9, for example. These features aren't there at all. In many of the examples in the functions section, he refers to cell ranges that don't appear in the screenshots. Chapter 12 includes a forward reference to chapter 41, "Connecting with Word, Access, Powerpoint and OneNote". There are only 38 chapters in the book, and the chapter he seems to be referring to (chapter 37) is actually called "Interacting with other office applications".

Finally, there are somethings that the book doesn't cover, that I was hoping for more discussion on - I was hoping for more coverage of charting in Excel, but this book devotes only 25 pages to the topic - there wasn't much more information on charting in this book than I was able to figure out just by playing around with the charting interface. I was hoping for a bit more from the "connecting worksheets, workbooks and external data" chapter - this is mostly just an overview of connectivity and no serious discussion (there are also no examples of integrating with non-Microsoft database products like Oracle or MySQL). Chapter 37, "Interacting with other Office Applications", was fairly pointless - all of the procedures were "use CTRL+C to copy the data and CTRL+V to paste it". I guess when you already have a 1,023-page book, you have to shorten some sections... but be aware that if these are your main interests, this isn't the book for you.

The further into reading this manual I get, the more annoyed it leaves me. I read manuals like this from start to finish for two purposes: 1)to become familiar with the workings of the latest version of a particular program; and 2)to give myself a refresher to see whether I'm missing some useful fundamentals in my ongoing use of a tool that has served me for (in the case of Excel) almost twenty years. This book does a decent job on my first purpose; it is totally focused on the changes in Excel 2007 from the prior versions of Excel, and spends a lot of ink on discussing the author's attitudes about how Microsoft has done things and his annoyances at their not responding to more of his requests.

However, for my second purpose, I find this book to be very dissappointing. In fact, it occurs to me that a person who has never used a spreadsheet before who tries to learn by reading this book might not even come to understand the essence of how a spreadsheet works. The author never sets the context of what a spreadsheet does and when to use it, and he dives into his topic with no cogent concept of how he has organized his material and how this organization will build the reader's knowledge upon a solid foundation.

For example, very early in the book he goes into great detail about conditional formatting, long before he has said the first thing about how data gets into cells to begin with. Formulas and their absolute and relative references, the essence of Excel, don't appear until the middle of this tome. The book totally presumes that the reader has a decent working knowledge of previous versions of Excel--which would be fine if the book were entitled "Upgrading to Excel 2007" rather than "Using Excel 2007--The Only Excel Book You Need".

Somewhere in the preface the author mentions that writing the book was an intense and hermetic affair--which I began to appreciate once I realized that it didn't seem as though anybody else actually read the book before it was printed. It is very clear that the author, clearly an Excel expert, was under extreme competitive pressure to get something into publication as soon as possible after MS released Office 2007. In his haste, he was too busy comparing the new version to the previous to think about how his book would read to the person who wanted to start from the beginning.

The haste shows in other areas as well. There are blatent omissions of some pretty basic concepts, such as how to manoevre chart objects and manage and edit their data inputs, even as there is tremendous detail on other capabilities. There is the usual number of typos and incorrect illustration references that one sees in so many books nowadays that seem to go straight from their authors' word processors to the printing press. And not in the author's control but frustrating nonetheless are the graphics, mostly screen shots, that are so gray and often so small that they actually sent me to the optometrist for new glasses.

On the plus side, the book is a tremendous reference on functions, devoting hundreds of pages to exploring these in detail. And the author is clearly quite expert and understands the sorts of tasks that typical users employ Excel for. I would enjoy hearing him speak on, for example, his favorite tips and tricks, and I intend to take advantage of the resources on his MrExcel.com web site. I therefore expect to get some benefit from this book now and in the future, but it would have been so much better had the author collaborated with a good editor who could have lent a perspective on how the book would read to a reader who wants to start at the beginning.

I purchased this book as a reference for a class that I am teaching. So far I've only read about 10 chapters of material, but have found at least 50 errors. These range from small, such as spelling, to large, aggravating issues such as referring to the wrong figures or charts. I have actually stopped reading the book and have purchased another from a different company and author. My suggestion would be to look at other books and purchase one of those. There are at least three other books on the market that do a better job than this one.

This book unfortunately leaves a lot to be desired in order to leave up to its proclaimed sub-title as "the only Excel book you'll ever need". For an Excel book, this one has a few key shortcomings:
- no data to practice the examples with: any serious Excel book should make available to the reader the data that the examples in the book are based on - many readers would be interested in actually practicing the examples
- way too many errors, even for a first edition - one of the most annoying type of errors are the ones that point to figures that don't exist or the wrong figures altogether
- too many pages in a row filled with endless lists of functions or other attributes - instead of focusing on the most popular ones in the narrative and provide the whole list in an appendix

This book has some positives as well, such as a comprehensive treatment of topics in general and perhaps the most comprehensive treatment of Excel functions I have come across. However, these positive aspects are far outweighed by the negative aspects I mentioned above.

I cannot believe that Bill Jelen wrote this almost 1,000 page tome and did not include a single bit of code/example of tables used in the book. Neither the Safari nor InformIT websites (quepublising is owned by them) have any downloadable code for the examples used in this book. So you are reduced to not only the time to read this monster but to have to stop and enter all the code manually and hopefully without entry errors. Duh!!!!!!!!! What a concept that I would want to actually learn by practicing using the examples in the book.

I sincerely hope Mr. Jelen doesn't teach his formal classes this way. Per Mr. Jelen's reputation I have given this book a single star because he is suppose to know better. There is simply no viable excuse for this short coming from either the author, publisher or anyone else involved with this.

As a side note this seems to be a claring fault with the computer book publishing industry as a whole.

Try Excel 2007 the Missing Manuel because it does have downloadable examples to learn with.

Best wishes, Steve

I love the Special Edition series. Microsoft Excel 2007 is truly a different and complicated animal and this book really simplifies it but you have to be very familiar with Excel in general or the language and the graphics might be a bit overwhelming. I also purchased the Special Edition series Access 2007 and am planning to purchase Word 2007 next.