Excel Best Practices for Business: Covers Excel 2003, 2002, and 2000 (Paperback)

by Loren Abdulezer (Author) "Although the cover lists this book as being intended is for intermediate to advanced users of Excel, rest assured that even if you consider yourself..." (more)
Key Phrases: spreadsheet portal, spreadsheet construction techniques, spreadsheet regions, Assistive Portal, Web Services, Smart Data (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description
Spreadsheets have become the de facto standard for communicating business information and the preferred tool for analyzing business data. In this current climate, the accuracy and clarity of spreadsheets are paramount. However, busy managers have little time to sift through heaps of reference books to extrapolate techniques for making polished spreadsheets. Even with finished spreadsheets in hand, managers and business professionals still need a book which holds up a mirror to their real world situations and reflects hidden flaws; and then takes the next step and guides the reader in specific ways to rework these critical documents.

Excel Best Practices for Business enables readers to examine their work and ask critical questions. And once asked, this book also answers with dynamic, practical approaches and provides Take-Aways extrapolated from real situations across a managerial spectrum, making this book more mentor than reference. In this book, a critical need is met.

Book Highlights:

• XML in Microsoft Office Excel 2003: Entirely new to Excel 2003 is major support for XML, making Excel truly web capable and Internet ready. This book provides extensive coverage of these new features from a hands-on perspective. It identifies subtleties, gotchas and problems, and shows you practical solutions and workarounds.
• SPREADSHEET PORTALS: This book introduces the topic of Spreadsheet Portals, which elevates spreadsheet practices for the Internet-ready software to the next level. Aside from explaining the basic concepts and principles of Desktop Client Portals, best practice techniques for building your portal pages and reference implementations are provided. These reference implementations, sample spreadsheets, and online demos are provided on the book's CD.
• SPREADSHEET MAKEOVERS: What do you do when your manager or boss asks you to take over a complex, spreadsheet-based application and send out reports every two weeks? The person who created the spreadsheet no longer works for the company. Aside from a few emails, there's no documentation. You look at the spreadsheet and you find it has flaws. Never mind about fixing the old reports; the new ones are going to go out with your name on it. This report is not your prime responsibility. You do not have the time or resources to turn this into a whole project, yet you can't afford to leave it the way it is. Excel Best Practices for Business provides a step-by-step approach to these "Mission Impossible" situations and walks you through the steps with fully worked out examples.
• ASSISTIVE TECHNOLOGIES: For the first time in a mainstream book, the topic of preparing accessible spreadsheets for individuals with disabilities is addressed. Government agencies needing to make electronic information section 508 compliant and corporations choosing not to alienate communities with special needs will find the techniques presented invaluable. You will learn from a hands-on perspective how to organize and design accessible spreadsheets for the visually impaired that will work with Screen Reader software, how to set up Screen Reader software, and how to build graphical components that will work with Screen Readers. These practices are carried to the next level with the introduction of Assistive Portals. This allows you to make spreadsheets accessible and avoid having to alter your original spreadsheets. The Portal Page does all the work. Because it is table driven, there are no formulas or scripts to modify. Think of how this will change the economics of preparing accessible documents.

There are many more topics in Excel Best Practices For Business including: practical techniques for visualizing hard-to-present data, incorporating "Smart Data" into your spreadsheets, how to build a Data Overpass, quantification of uncertainty, conversion of mountains of legacy data into manageable and useful form, spreadsheet auditing to validate the work of others, a hands-on approach to working with the Excel Solver tool, spreadsheet construction techniques through both simple design and large, complex applications. If you want to find about these and many other techniques covered, then Excel Best Practices for Business is the perfect guide!

From the Back Cover
Everything you need to know about

• Implementing the new XML features in Spreadsheet Portals and Web Services
• Auditing spreadsheets provided by third parties
• Making spreadsheets accessible to individuals with disabilities
• Performing spreadsheet makeovers
• Constructing large, complex spreadsheets that are efficiently designed and easily maintained
• Quantifying uncertainty and incorporating "fuzzy" numbers in financial analysis
• Moving and managing mountains of data with competence and efficiency

What do your spreadsheets have to say about your business?

In a corporate climate tainted by high-profile accounting issues, the answer to that question is paramount. This book empowers you to create, manage, and validate spreadsheets that will stand up to scrutiny and provide a clear and accurate picture of your enterprise. It shows you how to examine your work for hidden flaws, preserve the integrity of inherited spreadsheets while improving their clarity, and apply specific techniques to achieve results. If you need practical techniques you can use today, you’ll find them here.

"Excel Best Practices for Business is a "must-read" for today's busy professionals working with quantitative information."
–Tom Inman, Vice-President, WebSphere Foundation & Tools; IBM Software Group

CD-ROM Includes

• A selection of "Quick ’n’ Easy Take-Aways"– sample components and spreadsheets that can be quickly and easily modified to meet various business needs
• Mathematica Version 5 evaluation

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Product Details

• Paperback: 540 pages
• Publisher: For Dummies (November 14, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 076454120X
• ISBN-13: 978-0764541209
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 7.3 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (17 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #534,518 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

47 of 49 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Novice or expert - good advice comes cheap this time!,, July 25, 2004

By	M. Los "Martin Los" (Spain) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

In one year I bought (in succesive order):
1. John Walkenbach - Excel 2000 Power Programming with VBA
2. Michael Kofler - Definitive Guide to Excel VBA
3. Loren Abdulezer - Excel Best Practice for Business

The first two books use a lot of VBA code examples. Loren's Excel Best Practice for Business is a refreshing surprise. Written in simple, easy to understand english in fluent lines that read away as though is was a novel! Once started , I couldn't stop reading untill I finished the whole book.

Its details are simple, but most effective. The outlined ideas give you a headstart when creating and maintaining Excel files.

For example, Loren demostrates clearly what pitfalls to escape from when you design any Excel file. It is good that Loren reminds the reader of some old Roman advise ('Divide and Conquer') when recommending to SEPARATE the date into 3 layers: 1) original date, 2) analysis layer and 3) presentation layer) to CONQUER in your work of creating and maintaing Excel files.

It is funny how, if one looks at his or her own Excel files, this simple device is still broken many times.

Another example deals with the advantages of the R1C1 workbookstyle compared to the traditional A1 style. It sounds so simple, but yet, in Walkenbach and Kofler you will not find these kind of tips.

Finally the book has great examples on the CD. Examples on how to use conditional formatting to colour and present your data.

In a nutshell, I can advise anyone to buy this book, whether he or she considers him or herself a novice or expert Excel user. GO GET IT!

31 of 33 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Best Practices is the best. This time I am right., January 11, 2005

By	Arthur "a learner forever" (Beijing, China) - See all my reviews

Firstly, I have to tell everybody that I am from China, and I got this this book from a friend of mine.

Here is a story. Several years ago, when I worked in a network coporation, the CFO, an MBA back from USA, said to us, "If anyone in this coporation can use Excel as skillfully as those guys from ... (a famous consultanting company, who then worked as our consultant) do, I will raise his monthly salary by RMB1,000!" I was confused, "Is Excel so valuable, or, magic? If yes, what can it do for me? It's just a table-maker (and I heard of that it can do some calculations), but I am not an accountant nor an analyst. Well, perhaps I will never be qualified to get that RMB1,000; eventhough I learn it by myself, the sales job makes it unreasonable for me to to get it. Forget it!"

Last year, I saw EXCEL BEST PRACTICES FOR BUSINESS accidentally in a friend's home, and then there was no Chinese version of it. Since I thought my English is ok, I took it and had a rough reading. By just looking some titles and figures, I knew I had been totally wrong about Excel! It can do a lot for any business, as long as the business has something, even little, to do with data analysis and statistics! I took the book home and began to read line by line, following every example spreadsheet on the accompanying CD. I found something never heard of before, and I began to know that Excel is really useful to anyone. The book tells me how to get clear human resource information from a sea of data, which is especially helpful for me, to predict "unmeasurable" targets, and to make use of "uneditalbe" data from a PDF document, of course all with Excel. Those examples and tools on the CD are really great, they helped to solve some problems at-hands. The book begins with simple issues, such as cell reference style, which I've never heard of before, and goes as far as some complicated knowledge, such as how to get remote data with Excel 2003's XML capability, which is helping a friend of mine in a big project. So both beginners and experienced users will get benefit from it. Any one wanting to get the most from Excel will found this book is a powerful squeezer.

Also, I got a satifying after-sale service as another one did. Even though I want to monopolise such a valuable resource, but Best Practices should be shared. This time I am right.

19 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Thank You for showing me the light, March 30, 2004

By	Jim Shields "jim134" (New York, NY United States) - See all my reviews

Too often, while going through this book, did I say to myself, "I've tried that", often recalling the mixed results I had. This book and the awesome accompanying CD has empowered me to return to those battles with a concise set of tools, to get the results I was looking for the first time. The section on resolving PDF data was immediately helpful, as were the Pivot Table sections of the book. Excel is my first choice for an analyses tool, both for my business and of my business. The techniques and tools presented in this book have quadrupled my abilities to do both. I've wasted too much time wading through reference books and help screens to achieve the results I've always felt were possible within Excel.