Recently O’Reilly released my new book, Head First Excel. The book goes into advanced topics in Excel but is really about teaching Excel beginners how to use the software to solve big problems.
How this book is different: The Excel part
I wrote this book with a specific idea about what it means to be good at using Excel. People who know Excel know formulas. And by “knowing formulas,” I mean that these users know a bunch of different functions, they know how to make those functions work with each other, and they know how to find new functions when the functions they know aren’t sufficient to solve their problems.
If you want to get good at Excel, you need to master formulas.
And if you want to have fun with Excel, formulas are the way to do it, too. It’s enormously gratifying to write just a line or two of code that makes your data sing, or to make data do or say something that your colleagues never thought possible. It’s also gratifying to take someone else’s spreadsheet — something consisting of an elaborate soup of formulas — and figure out how it works.
You can use Excel without being a formula master, but the power of Excel is in its formulas, and I’m so excited about Head First Excel because it will take total formula newbies and help them develop into masters. The book assumes you know nothing, but by the end you’re doing seriously heavy stuff with spreadsheets. Here’s the chapter list:
- Introduction to formulas
- Visual design
- References
- Change your point of view
- Data types
- Dates and times
- Finding functions
- Formula auditing
- Charts
- What if analysis
- Text functions
- Pivot tables
- Booleans
- Segmentation
Plenty of the chapters aren’t explicitly about formulas, but every one of them has you practicing this crucial topic at some level. And what surprised me so much about other books on Excel is that they don’t ask you to practice formulas. You’d think that something so fundamental to getting good at the program would receive more treatment.
How this book is different: The Head First part
The style of Head First books, as you can see from the free sample chapters for each book, is colloquial and visual. But don’t imagine for a second that this means the content is simplistic. The style makes the books very highly optimized for learning. You pick up concrete skills in a fun but inexorable way as your progress through the book.
We who write and publish these books believe that the difficulty people experience learning technical topics comes not from the difficulty of the topics of themselves but rather from poor presentation by the teachers. Head First Excel is a 448-page book that’s designed to be read straight through without the reader ever getting bored or frustrated.
I started off as a fan, reading Head First books back when I read the first edition of Head First Java as a theology student (long story). During the past several years O’Reilly has published a whole mess of Head First books, and they’re all fantastic. Last year I wrote Head First Data Analysis, so Excel is my second Head First book.
I hope you enjoy Head First Excel. Being able to use this software’s powerful features is one of the most important skills you can have in business, and frankly I don’t think I’ve made an important decision in my life or career without firing up Excel first.