Excel for Chemists: A Comprehensive Guide

Rating:
Summary: Nice reference book for data analysis in the chemistry lab
Review: As a member of chemistry department in a University, who teach student the basic skill of use of Excel in the lab, I find this book a very useful tool for myself. Although it is true that the book is a little too complicated for the average user who knows only the basics of spreadsheet and barely graph the data, however for somebody who needs to write macro functions for the students to perform the calculations effortlessly, Excel for Chemist is a very comprehensive book. Exmaples given in this book is fair: after all, this book is not for everybody, and I have a feeling that Billo wrote this book based upon the assumption that most readers know more than the basic of Excel (which is not too surprising, considering the fact that Excel is one of the most heavily used spreadsheet around).

Rating:
Summary: Book is Dated
Review: Essentially the Book can be viewed as: 1. Part 1: Basic Excel techniques that most users already know. 2. Part 2: Intermediate Excel techniques that many users of Excel have already picked up. 3. Part 3: Advanced Excel techniques. More specialized and their usefulness depends on how many are needed for a chemist's job. More advanced users (which is probably the target audience for the book) have most likely picked up the techniques that are useful for them and could figure out the others if they were required for their job. 4. Part 4: Chemical Applications of Excel. Very specialized and of only limited appeal. As mentioned in the advanced techniques, many users (probably the target audience) could figure these out if they were required. 5. Appendices are of limited appeal since the online help has a complete list and these are not only part of the lists, but are dated.

Book is very dated. Subject matter is not for Excel 97. Excel 97 was released after the book was in print, though new features in Excel 97 are noted in Appendix I. Most material seemed geared to Excel 4.0 with some mention of Excel 5.0.

Examples in book are all from the Macintosh version of Excel, so it doesn't have the feel of the version IBM version.

The example worksheets for the chapters are not mentioned in the chapter, many are not that worthwhile and many macros do not work since they are Excel 4.0 macros

Rating:
Summary: This book does not do any justice to real chemical analysis!
Review: Excel for Chemists: a comprehensive guide is any but! As a chemistry student who uses this program and wanted to learn how to make excel do more, I found Billo's book useless. It was hard to follow and the examples were poor. The accompanying disk did not work(it was not even formatted!) I called John Wiley Tech Support in the book twice and the publisher did not respond to my messages! Billo could have done a better job by giving mutliple examples with clear directions on how to write complex scientific equations, macros, and how to use excel to fit data. The only useful things I got from the book is how to to create forms and the chapter for advance charting techniques. If another edition is in the making I would like to see the author include different examples of chemical analysis for spectrometric data and more examples of how to use excel for data analysis in other areas of chemistry: polymer, gas-phase studies, lifetime data. I think people learn best through examples; clear ones that build on one or more skills at a time.