Microsoft Office Excel 2007: The L Line, the Express Line to Learning

Jacobs takes a beginner to Excel on a short course that quickly gives useful mastery of the basics. You needn't have used any spreadsheet in the past. The concept of a spreadsheet is easily explained, along with nice features of Excel. Like being able to read various file types, including the ever-present CSV (comma separated value) and PDF. Excel prefers its own XLS format in which you'll be storing most of your spreadsheets. Data input into worksheets is shown. Then more advanced stuff, like connecting various cells in a formulaic manner. It is this which really distinguishes a computer spreadsheet from simple tabular data. What the book teaches is that being able to writing formulas is the key skill to using Excel. (Actually any spreadsheet, but here we're talking about Excel 2007.) If you want to focus on mastering one aspect of Excel, it should be here. For one thing, by linking cells this way, you can "role play" various scenarios, by changing a cell's values and seeing the effect ripple through a table. The book does go on to discuss other important topics. Including various ways to display data, like scatterplots and pie graphs. The visuals are significant in their own right. Because people can often grasp a graph quicker than a table of numbers.