3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
322 Tips for the Intermediate User, April 26 2006
By John Matlock "Gunny" - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: F1 Get the Most out of Excel!: The Ultimate Excel Tip Help Guide: Excel 97, Excel 2000, Excel 2002, Excel 2003 (Paperback)
This book might have an alternative title of 322 Nifty Hints and Tips of things you can do with Excel. As such, it is not a beginners book for Excel. It doesn't tell you things like this is a spread sheet. Instead it tells you things like how to reverse the order of characters in a cell. For instance if you have a cell that contains ABCDE and it you want it to be EDCBA, you go to tip 139 on page 323 and it gives you a canned VBA module that will do it. Tip 139 just takes two pages, about average for a tip.
I find that I don't use this little book (it's little in format, not in page count) very often. But when I do, it gives me exactly the information that I want quickly and easily.
Two areas deserve particular mention:
Note the sub-title of the book where it talks about all the different versions of Excel. Some tips have to be spread out. Tip 144 talks about how to get continuously refreshed data from a web site in Excel 97. Tip 145 is the same subject but for Excel 2000. Tip 146 is the same thing for Excel 2002 and 2003.
And second Tips 296 through 322 cover nifty and wonderful things you can do with Pivot Tables. Many books don't even mention pivot tables, and they are a very powerful way to show data in different ways that are often more meaningful to executives.
Great help for those who are using Excel beyond the basics.
7 of 9 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
Size Matters!, Dec 2 2004
By Dark Mechanicus JSG "Black Ops Teep" - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: F1 Get the Most out of Excel!: The Ultimate Excel Tip Help Guide: Excel 97, Excel 2000, Excel 2002, Excel 2003 (Paperback)
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!
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
4.0 out of 5 stars
many concise tips on usage, Dec 23 2004
By W Boudville - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: F1 Get the Most out of Excel!: The Ultimate Excel Tip Help Guide: Excel 97, Excel 2000, Excel 2002, Excel 2003 (Paperback)
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.