Excel X for Mac OS X: Visual QuickStart Guide

I received Excel X for Mac OS X in excellent condition. Love it. Thank you.

This is the second book I've purchased written by Maria Langer. The first was Mac OS X Panther (Visual QuickStart Guide). Like the book for panther. Excel X is great for those new to the program, or for those who have little experience in formating the spreadsheets, conjuring up formulas, and establish and managing lists. For more experienced/advanced users, you'll appreciate the book as quick reference and the nice tips you'll find to increase your efficiency. But if you're looking for more advanced techniques (i.e. scripts, macros, advanced formatting) you might want to look elsewhere.

This book probably works just as well for an introduction to Excel for the ones who have no experience with this program. Given that I have extensive experience with Excel, my review focuses on this guide's ability to transfer your Excel skills from the Wintel to the Mac OS environment. This guide does a very good job of transferring the skills you have acquired in Excel/Wintel to Excel/Mac OS in the minimum of time. The format of the book is even superior to the Dummies series (my favorite until now). This is because each page is smartly divided between a relevant simple list of action steps to take to achieve a specific function. And, the other half of the page shows actual pictures of what the screen will look like. So, the emphasis on actual visuals is second to none (it is ahead of the Dummies series on that count). It is the simplest stuff who will baffle you at first. The more advanced features of Excel are common whether you work on the Mac or the Wintel platform. But, what is unsettling is that the simplest features are different. When you first work with Excel for Mac, just the simple viewing and editing of cells is different. It leads one to believe that Excel for Mac and Wintel are really incompatible. They are actually very compatible. But, you just have to understand how the Mac environment works. It is a little bit different. Once you get the hang of it, it's a cruise. After studying this guide, you will quickly realize that Excel for Mac is just as flexible and powerful an analytical tool as Excel/Wintel. It even has some advantages. The Clipboard is more visible and useful. The Calculator feature gives you more space and control when developing complex formulas. The List function offers more robust database capabilities than the traditional Excel. It integrates Access capabilities into Excel. The graph function has several additional 3-D capabilities. Thus, overall I strongly recommend this book, that will quickly teach you Excel for the Mac.

I'm a long-time (since 1984) Mac user and devotee, so I'm not being heretical when I say that the best books about Excel are written for a Windows audience. The Mac versions of Excel are sufficiently compatible with the Windows versions that almost everything you learn from a Windows book will apply on the Mac. There are so many more Windows users (and especially power users) of Excel that many more books have been written for them. If you want to become a power user, try "Microsoft Excel 2000 Formulas" by John Walkenbach.