Excel Personal Trainer

Rating:
Summary: This should bring me up to speed with Excel...
Review: Along with the PowerPoint 2003 Personal Trainer book, I received a review copy of Excel 2003 Personal Trainer (O'Reilly) the other day. This is one I won't show my wife, as I think I'll keep this one for myself.

Chapter List: The Fundamentals; Editing a Worksheet; Formatting a Worksheet; Creating and Working with Charts; Managing Your Workbooks; More Functions and Formulas; Working with Lists; Automating Tasks with Macros; Working with Other Programs; Using Excel with the Internet; Data Analysis and PivotTables; What-If Analysis; Advanced Topics; Index

As a long-time techie, people expect me to be an expert in any software they happen to be running. One of the more common questions I get is "how do I do <insert their problem here> in Excel?". To which I answer... "Beats me!" I've just never taken the time to learn how to work the software. In fact, my wife (who is a relative newbie when it comes to software) knows more about Excel than I do. So, looking at this book, I think it's about time to improve on those skills.

The Personal Trainer series uses a lightly-themed muscle/superhero motif that isn't overly cute or annoying. Each chapter has objectives, a central task, and prerequisites to working the following lessons. After anywhere from five to twenty lessons for a given chapter, there's a summary of the material, a quiz, and "homework" that you can do to explore a little further on your own. On top of all that, the CD in the back has an Excel simulator you can use to practice your skills without necessarily having to have the software loaded on a given computer. Since I have Excel loaded, I won't need that, nor will I have to go through each of the lessons that assume little to no background in Excel or even how Window applications work. But I should be able to grasp all the Excel fundamentals I sorely lack right now in a relatively short period of time. And then I might be able to answer some of my wife's pleas for application support.

Good material, covers all the basics and quite a few of the bells and whistles, and it all reads well. Now if I can only hide it from my wife...

Rating:
Summary: An objective metric of your knowledge
Review: Do you see the amusing part on the book's cover? Not the cartoon chick with big breasts. The book's printing date is 2005, so the 2003 in the title is deprecated, as being slightly awkward. Hence, let us not ask where is Excel 2005?

Aside from this, the book gives a tightly focused test of your Excel knowledge. Each chapter is divided into lessons. Each lesson has a concise explanation of a topic. Then, the chapters end with quizzes and answers. Arguably, it is these quizzes that yield the key value of the book, as they let you actually test your grasp of the subjects. The questions seem to vary from easy to moderate in difficulty. Despite what the back cover says about the book being able to tone up skills of beginners and experienced users, if the latter includes you, then the book may simply be too easy.

Instead, the book may be of the most benefit to new users, who want an objective metric of their knowledge.