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Rating: 
Summary: An excellent introductory tutorial.
Review: I had tried reading through the entire list of Excel tutorials at the local library. All of them were disappointing to me, as they spent so much time extolling the glories of Excel that they never stopped to tell you what Excel was actually good for! And then they jumped right into complicated snippets of examples that were unrelated to anything in the real world, or even each other. These snippets were again designed to show off the glories of Excel, not to do anything practical, like build an actual real-life spreadsheet.As a programmer by profession, I always liked to "roll my own" solutions, using Visual Basic, MS Access, C++, whatever was at hand. And I've done some pretty fancy applications, including using MS Chart for graphing purposes. But those were mostly custom applications that Excel couldn't handle. I must say, however, now that I've read this book and have actually discovered what Excel is good for, it can certainly handle much more than I had supposed! I will be using Excel from now on for various financial applications instead of relying on my programming skills with VB and Access. The book begins with a basic spread sheet, which carries you all the way through to the final chapter, much like an accounting project in junior college might. And that was a welcome relief from those other tutorials. No dis-jointed jumping around from one unrelated example to the next exists here (as a reference guide might use). You follow the basic spreadsheet from chapter one all the way through to the final chapter, which builds in complexity, complete with pivot tables, and your understanding of Excel is added to as you go. If you want to learn the basics of Excel, or just understand what this program is good for (as I wanted to know) this is the book for you. You can easily master the material in two weeks, or less, especially if you already have a basic understanding of computer programming. All in all, an excellent primer.
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