Excel Annoyances: How to Fix the Most Annoying Things about Your Favorite Spreadsheet Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)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.

Click Here to see more reviews about: Excel Annoyances: How to Fix the Most Annoying Things about Your Favorite Spreadsheet


It's the solution to almost all of your electronic organization needs.Need to present a detailed expense report?Try an Excel spreadsheet.Keeping track of a complicated budget?Excel to the rescue.Want to keep tabs on your office football pool?You guessed it.

Thanks to its incredible versatility and power, Excel has emerged as more than just a mainstream program; it's now one of the most used applications on the planet.Everyone from run-of-the-mill PC users to leading financial analysts count on Excel to make sense of overflowing data. And to keep up with the overwhelming user demand, three different versions of Excel have hit the market since the debut of Excel 97: Excel 97, 2000, 2002, and 2003.Naturally, each version offers a new slate of next-generation upgrades--and, of course, operating bugs!

At last, Excel users have some relief: Excel Annoyances emerged from the suggestions of numerous Excel users who've struggled with these irritating bugs over the years.Written in the popularAnnoyancesformat, this latest O'Reilly helper addresses all of the quirks, bugs, inconsistencies, and hidden features found in each of the four versions.Chances are if someone, somewhere, found a certain step confusing, then it's addressed in Excel Annoyances.

Author Curtis D. Frye breaks down the cavalcade of information into several tip-of-the-finger categories such as Entering Data, Formatting, Charting, Printing, and more.If you're one of the millions of people who use Excel, you're sure to find a goldmine of helpful nuggets that you can use to fix the program's most annoying traits.In the end, Excel Annoyances will help you to truly maximize Excel's seemingly limitless potential.

Click here for more information about Excel Annoyances: How to Fix the Most Annoying Things about Your Favorite Spreadsheet

Read More...

iWork '09: The Missing Manual Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)From the overall organization of iWork '09: The Missing Manual to the examples used and phrases selected, Josh Clark has written this book to show us how to do what we want to do in iWork. He has succeeded. It is much better than just a manual.
Other iWork books are organized based upon the history of the program's development. They start with Keynote. iWork '09 The Missing Manual starts with Pages because that is what most people will use first.
You start with writing in Pages text mode, and are soon learning how to use the new outline features to organize your small book.
You learn that in text mode the text flows like rivers, but layout mode puts text in boxes like islands. You learn to flow your text from one island to the next.
Other iWork books all tell you how to put a text box and a picture on a page. That is not enough when you are looking at a blank page and wondering how to design your own layout.
Josh Clark shows you how to create a 6 column, or 5 column grid, and how to use it to align your objects to create your layout.
He has included more interesting information and useful tips than you will find in most manuals. Here are some examples:
Why does Pages open at 125% resolution when 100% is the "actual size?" This book has the answer.
If you make a mistake when you ask your Macintosh to learn a new word, here you will learn how to remove it from your dictionary.
He also tells you how to match a color in your photograph so you can use it in other objects.
In iWork '09 The Missing Manual you will learn more than the instructions for Keynote. You will learn how to plan, make and give a Keynote presentation that will engage your audience in your story, and to not use bullet points to tell your story. You will also learn when you should and should not use the new transitions.
The examples Josh Clark uses are suitable for most of us. To teach us to use Numbers, he uses a membership roster as an example of using a formula to transform text, and uses logic formulas to summarize our team's baseball statistics.
You will also learn about sheets and tables as well as the new multi-row headers and footers, and freezing the header for large spreadsheets.
As I read iWork '09 The Missing Manual I got the impression that Josh Clark really enjoyed writing this wonderful book. Because I thought he enjoyed writing it, I enjoyed reading it. After reading the online in Rough Cut, I bought the book. If you read this far, I believe you will want to buy it too.

Click Here to see more reviews about: iWork '09: The Missing Manual


With iWork '09, Apple's productivity applications have come of age. Unfortunately, their user guides are stuck in infancy. That's where iWork '09: The Missing Manual comes in. This book quickly guides you through everything you need to know about the Pages word-processor, the Numbers spreadsheet, and the Keynote presentation program that Al Gore and Steve Jobs made famous. Friendly and entertaining, iWork '09: The Missing Manual gives you crystal-clear and jargon-free explanations of iWork's capabilities, its advantages over similar programs -- and its limitations. You'll see these programs through an objective lens that shows you which features work well and which don't. With this book, you will:



Produce stunning documents and cinema-quality digital presentations
Take advantage of Mac OS X's advanced typography and graphics capabilities
Learn how to use the collection of themes and templates included with iWork
Get undocumented tips, tricks, and secrets for each program
Integrate with other iLife programs to use photos, audio, and video clips

Learn why iWork is the topic most requested by Missing Manual fans. One of the few sources available on Apple's incredible suite of programs, iWork '09: The Missing Manual will help you get the best performance out of Pages, Numbers, Keynote, and more in no time.

Click here for more information about iWork '09: The Missing Manual

Read More...