Excel Annoyances

Rating:
Summary: stomp the Paperclip
Review: Ok, Excel is the dominant spreadsheet. No question of that. But it has some surprising "features" which this book calls annoyances. It gives a multitude of them, with fixes for all. (Another O'Reilly series might call these fixes hacks.)

Logically enough, the book starts off with those difficulties that can be met when inputting data. Many of you will applaud that the leading annoyance is the Paperclip, on which much verbal ire has no doubt been expended. So Frye forthrightly shows how to terminate this pesky little bugger.

Later sections talk about formatting, formulae, charting, printing and so on. The chapters essentially follow the main functional structures of Excel. Some features might not be obvious to you; depending on your expertise. But chances are that for the average Excel user, you'll get some good advice from Frye.

Rating:
Summary: Well organized set of useful hints and pointers
Review: This is a well organized and written set of useful hints and pointers for Excel. They range from solutions to difficult data analysis issues, to tips about graphing, pivot tables, and importing data from various formats, notably XML.

The book is organized into chapters around central Excel themes; editing, formulas, formatting, charting, etc. Each chapter has a set of annoyances with a description and a solution. These annoyances are sometimes bugs, and sometimes just difficult issues that reasonably advanced users will run into where the help is either insufficient or poorly written. The fixes are generally fairly short and contained within the bounds of Excel, though the book does point to external sites and software where appropriate.

Definitely a must have for the power Excel user.