F1 Get the Most out of Excel! The Ultimate Excel Tip Help Guide: Excel 97, Excel 2000, Excel 2002, Excel 2003

Rating:
Summary: Not up to academic standards.
Review: As a former professor of mathematics, I've taught my share of CS. As a daily user of Excel, I'm always on the lookout for a book that explains Excel and helps to spread the good word about this excellent software. Mr. Rubin's book is, I can say without reserve, not it. He has done better work elsewhere, and I wish him well in his next efforts.

Rating:
Summary: Very helpfull for a professionalexcel user
Review: As an accountant I find this book extremely helpful in quickly being able to dind answers to my questions. I am a big fan of Mr. Rubin's books and would recommend this book and his other books to everyone. If you like saving time and getting the work done, this is the book for you.

Rating:
Summary: Filled with Time-Saving Tips That Are Easy to Locate
Review: As an infrequent Excel user, I seem to find new problems every time I take the program out for a spin. I note all of the ways that the program wastes my time and look in vain for helpful information inside the program itself.

When F1 arrived, I quickly trotted out my list of things that I would like to be able to do faster, easier and with less stress using Excel. I was pleasantly surprised to see many helpful solutions related to selecting, copying and pasting, formatting and printing. It took me less than an hour to find dozens of methods that I will be using the next time I trot out Excel. That was a good payoff compared to the price of the book and the time I spent. I estimate I will save three hours in my next project where I spend at least eight hours with Excel.

Although I didn't need this feature, I was very impressed that Mr. Rubin had taken the time to differentiate between Excel 97, Excel 2000, Excel 2002 and Excel 2003. If you have an older version, this book will not only help you accomplish more with the version you have . . . it will also help you decide if it's worth it to upgrade to the latest version.

I found the book easy to follow and was pleased to see that there's lots of room in the pages for notes. Those hand-written notes can be big time savers if you don't use Excel every day.

The book also has lots of information for much more advanced applications of Excel than I am ever likely to use. So if you find yourself about to use Excel in new ways, this book could be a big time-saver for you.

My only complaint about the book was that so much of the material didn't really help me. If the ratio of helpful to irrelevant tips had been higher, I would have happily assigned five stars to this otherwise helpful book.

Rating:
Summary: Good Excel Reference
Review: I've bent Excel over backwards doing things that it's not meant to do. I believe I'm an average user, maybe a notch above. This means knowing some of the lesser known tricks, but not a pro at pivots or creating elaborate financial spreadsheets. I have used pivots, but nothing heavy-duty.

This book is 820 pages, but half of it has room for notes on the left page that has Notes, My Tips/Shortcuts, and Related Tips for finding similar tips like the one on the current page. You can see what these look like in Amazon's "Search inside" feature. The book has 322 tips and even with as many pages as it has, it's surprisingly lightweight. I have books that are half its size and weigh more.

I also like the bookmarks on the side of the pages. Finding the part of interest is easy. The first page of a part lists the subjects covered and their bookmarks. These subject bookmarks appear with their related tips for quick referencing. You can use the index to find what you need.

Excel 97, 2000, 2002, and 2003 are covered. Each tip lets you know which versions of Excel can use it. In a majority of the tips, all versions are covered so no one with a specific version of Excel gets fewer tips than others.

Part I addresses the new features in Excel 2002 and 2003. It's very brief, so those who have it already won't feel like they're paying for useless information. The price is appropriate for a book of this size with the tips provided and the Excel versions covered. I won't rehash what each part covers as Amazon's "Search inside" also lists them and the complete index.

The writing is formal and stiff, but easy to follow. I had no trouble understanding the directions... most of the time. The screen shots fill in the gap when the tips aren't clear. Newcomers and seasoned users of Excel will benefit from the book. Those who are pros will need to study the table of contents using "Search inside" and decide whether or not the book meets their needs. The quick referencing guide, the format, and the screen shots provide the extra boost.

Rating:
Summary: The best Excel book in the market!
Review: I've read a lot of books on Excel, and I found this book the most helpful.
The book is a collection of brilliant tips, techniques and immediate solutions. At the beginning I thought this book is for beginners but as an experienced Excel user I find myself amazed how much I have learned, Just Great!!!
Highly Recommended



Rating:
Summary: The latest and greatest
Review: If you're looking for an Excel tip book that will actually help you and is not antiquated and useless, then look no further. This book's layout, from which I can find what I want quick, fast, and in a hurry, is extraordinarily user-friendly.

Joseph Rubin has written an easy-to-use, yet thorough, Excel tip book that runs the gamut from looking up something mundane such as <Ctrl+Shift+Home>(to take me to cell A1) to something more complex such as intricate custom functions and formulas that facilitate computing various business statistics.

Especially useful is its all-encompassing versatility -- i.e., it targets all Excel platforms from Excel 97 to Excel 2003. The small size of the book, smooth layout, incredibly useful tips that incorporate what the actual computer screen should look like while you're working on it, handy bookmark replete with a plethora of Excel shortcuts, as well as the fact that this book is more recent and up-to-date than its Microsoft counterparts all make this book a must buy for anyone looking to further their Excel acumen.

Rating:
Summary: Size Matters!
Review: Joseph Rubin, Excel spreadsheet guru, prolific author of the "Mr. Excel" books, and savvy CPA, has put together a pithy, practical, and most of all PORTABLE little field-book giving you quick tips to the nuts and bolts of Excel. If you're a Controller, CFO, Wall Street investment banker and analyst, finance practitioner, corporate finance warrior, and spreadsheet junky---if you use Excel every day---then "F1: Get the Most out of Excel" is for you.

No, it's not a strategy guide to building better spreadsheets, and very likely you know most of this stuff anyway.

But let's back up a second. I live and breathe Excel. I can model Byzantine, insanely detailed spreadsheets in my sleep. Sometimes I DREAM in Excel (yeah, I know, I'm a sicko).

But every now and then you'll be working on a model and need some nugget of Excel esoterica---you'll want a quick crash course on getting the most out Pivot-Tables, say---and you won't have a handy field guide that weighs less than 500 pounds.

That's the glory of Rubin's new book: it's lightweight, it's breezy, it gives you the down-and-dirty from light-speed mobility within the spreadsheet, to navigating and correcting the Dread Circular Reference, to quick and easy formatting, and a host of other necessary things you often neglect. And what would you do without this light-weight little fieldbook? You'd have to haul out one of the gigantic two-ton-Tessy primers---and frankly, that's just not an option all the time.

Just to recap: this is not a revolutionary work. You'll find nothing esoteric here: no novel new ways of building better, faster, stronger valuation models or deeply analytical spreadsheets. That's not what this book is about, and that's not what Rubin set out to do.

What you *will* find is a fine little tome that is a model of simplicity, brevity, style, and practicality. If you find yourself in need of something lightweight that nonetheless helps you burrow into Excel's guts---in virtually any version---then just hit F1---"F1: Get the Most out of Excel", that is. Bravo!


Rating:
Summary: many concise tips on usage
Review: Microsoft Excel is now the de facto spreadsheet for most users on PCs. A very mature product. With many, and perhaps too many, features. So much so that there are definitive tomes on Excel; elucidating every option. Rubin offers an alternative in this pocketbook format. A deliberately compact handheld form factor that offers over 300 tips on usage.

He's not a computer person, per se. But as an end user who happens to be an accountant. Very apropos, given that spreadsheets are that profession's stomping ground. In this regard, he is better qualified than some Microsoft developer, to offer you what might be practical and useful.

Be deliberate design, he gives tips that can fit within one (small) page. No tips are elaborate. But they are concise and possibly what you might actually need.

Rating:
Summary: Haven't I seen this book before, but with a different title?
Review: So what? I mean .. is that all there is? This book is just a re-hash of the same tips in the original "Mr Excel On Excel". If you own that book, there isn't much new here. The author had a chance to add descriptions about how things worked but instead included hundreds of nearly blank pages to write my own notes. If I wanted to keep my own notes, I would have bought a spiral-bound notebook for a dollar. Also, this book .. something about the grammer .. hard to understand at times.

Rating:
Summary: Sinner Says: Don't Buy This Book !!
Review: The book doesn't explain how anything works. The author assumes you are an Excel guru and makes you scratch your head trying to figure out what he is talking about. If you are not already an Excel guru, this book will confuse the heck out of you.

Further, it is too obvious that this book was not originally written in English. Perhaps the book was a little more understandable in the author's native tongue, but the translator does not do it justice.