Excel Hacks: 100 Industrial-Strength Tips and Tools [ILLUSTRATED] (Paperback)

by Raina Hawley (Author), David Hawley (Editor)
Key Phrases: conditional formatting, web services, extracting data, Hacking Excel's Built-in Features, Connecting Excel, Charting Hacks (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review
The spreadsheet is the software tool that turns everyone into a hacker by making it possible to play with numbers easily. Excel Hacks, therefore, makes a lot of sense. This small, fact-dense book explains how to get maximum utility from Microsoft's popular calculation application. It shows how to use all the stuff you know is in there but have never bothered to figure out (dynamic cell ranges, PivotTables, macros), and how to carry out particularly hasslesome calculations (notably those involving dates). The coverage is all the more succinct because the authors didn't feel obligated (thankfully) to include the ponderous basics of Excel--the details of formatting and simple calculation that fill up pages and pages of more typical Excel guides.

The Hawleys' treatment of PivotTables is typical of their approach to Excel. The authors explain this powerful statistical analysis feature with a series of four recipes (called "hacks") that go from straight documentation of the feature (how to create an unadorned PivotTable) to more complicated tricks involving Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) as it applies to PivotTables. They provide some background information along the way, but the main focus of the hacks is procedural: Follow along with the text and you'll see your spreadsheets do new tricks. You'll also understand what's going on, so you'll be better able to modify the procedures to suit your own requirements. --David Wall

Topics covered: How to use the most powerful and least-understood features of Microsoft Excel (versions 2000 and later) for Windows and Mac OS. Sections address data lookups, statistical calculations, charting, macros, and general tricks for enhanced efficiency.

Product Description
You don't need to know everything that Excel can do in order to use it effectively, but if you're like the millions of Excel power users looking to improve productivity, then Excel Hacks will show you a wide variety of Excel tasks you can put to use, most of which are off the beaten path. The "100 Industrial Strength Tips and Tools" in Excel Hacks include little known "backdoor" adjustments for everything from reducing workbook and worksheet frustration to hacking built-in features such as pivot tables, charts, formulas and functions, and even the macro language. This resourceful roll-up-your-sleeves guide is for intermediate to advanced Excel users eager to explore new ways to make Excel do things--from data analysis to worksheet management to import/export--that you never thought possible. Excel Hacks will help you increase productivity with Excel and give you hours of "hacking" enjoyment along the way.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 304 pages
• Publisher: O'Reilly Media, Inc.; 1st edition (March 1, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 059600625X
• ISBN-13: 978-0596006259
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars See all reviews (18 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #332,882 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

74 of 75 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars How to Do More, November 23, 2004

By	Bruce J. Kratofil (Cleveland, OH) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Microsoft Excel is an extremely powerful tool. Yet most users have only scratched the surface of its power, using only a small part of its capabilities.

Excel Hacks: 100 Industrial-Strength Tips & Tools by David & Raina Hawley, shows readers how to do more, and how to do things better, with the market-leading spreadsheet. The word "hack" here refers to its original meaning in computers. A hack was either a "quick and dirty solution" or a "clever way of doing things", and didn't refer to breaking into systems. This book presents 100 different hacks spread over eight categories, covering the basics; built-in features; naming hacks; pivot tables; charts; formulas and functions; macros; and connecting Excel to the rest of the world.

Individually, none of these hacks may cause you to run down the street shouting "Eureka", but together they should help just about every Excel user. I consider myself an expert user, working with spreadsheets for over twenty years and teaching classes in Excel and 1-2-3, yet I was still able to learn a lot from this book. In some cases, it was genuinely new information (Hack #50, Explode a Single Slice from a Pie Chart or Hack #99, Access SOAP Web Services from Excel). In other cases, it showed how to use a tool I knew about in some different way (Hack #41, Create Custom Functions Using Names or Hack #78, Construct Mega-Formulas). A couple of times, it served as a reminder to use some tool that I had been neglecting (Hack #6, Customize the Template Dialog and Default Workbook).

Some of the hacks are usability tips, showing how other tools (such as pivot tables) will be more useful if you lay out data in a certain way. Several tips help if you develop spreadsheets for others to use, limiting their capacity to screw things up. Sometimes, the hacks may just spur you to further thought, making you think "Gee, if you can use this tool to do this, maybe with just a little more work I can get it do that!"

The hacks are self-contained, so you don't have to read the book cover-to-cover. If a particular topic doesn't interest you, it won't hurt to jump ahead, or even skip a particular chapter. You don't need to type in long, complicated listings either. You can download the sample code for all the hacks from the authors' website. The authors do Excel training and application work in western Australia, and their website is crammed with more Excel material.

Who should read this book? The ideal audience is the broad middle class of Excel users. You shouldn't give it to a beginner, because they are still learning about the forest while this book looks at individual trees. Super power users, who may know ninety of these hacks already, won't get that much of it either, but they should be writing the books, not reading them. But for everyone in between, the book is sure to teach something you didn't know about Excel.

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40 of 43 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Treasure chest full of tips for Excel users..., May 31, 2004

By	Thomas Duff "Duffbert" (Portland, OR United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

If you spend any time working with Excel as part of your job, you'll really like this book... Excel Hacks by David & Raina Hawley (O'Reilly). This book contains 100 tips and tricks related to the Excel spreadsheet package from Microsoft. The tips are divided into the following chapters:

Reducing Workbook And Worksheet Frustration; Hacking Excel's Built-in Features; Naming Hacks; Hacking PivotTables; Charting Hacks; Hacking Formulas And Functions; Macro Hacks; Connecting Excel To The World

This particular Hacks book has an advantage that many other Hacks titles don't have. The subject matter relates to a single program, so nearly all the hacks are applicable to an Excel user. Contrast that to a Hacks title like Network Security Hacks, where your choice of operating system limits the number of tips that you can use. While there are some Windows-only Excel hacks included, most all the tricks work on both the Windows and Mac version of Excel. Nobody should feel left out here.

I especially liked the chapter on the charting hacks. They outline a technique for building a speedometer chart that is really impressive.

If you are an Excel power user (or know someone who is), this is the book for you.

20 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent !!!, September 22, 2004

By	Eric Eskin (Wilmington, DE USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This is one of those rare books which provides value for all skill levels. I have been using Excel for over 10 years and am generally happy if I learn 3 or 4 new methods for using Excel from a particular book. There are numerous examples here of implementing Excel solutions that I have not seen or thought of previously. Further, these examples can be implemented by virtually any user of the product. The content is well-written and provides very good examples of the "hacks." BUY it even if you think you know everything there is to know about Excel.