Product Description

Brace youself, because here comes QuickSteps: The fast, easy, accessible information on Excel 2003 in a full-color cookbook-style format. Provides answers to all of your How-do-I questions in a concise and meaningful way. Lengthwise page layout allows for easy page viewing. Useful tips and cautions are displayed in the margins so that they don’t break the flow of the quick steps themselves.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #66289 in Books
• Published on: 2004-01-27
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 224 pages

Book Info
Full-color guide to Excel 2003, featuring screen shots and instructions on how to create charts and graphs, analyze data, and more. Quick access with color-coded thumb tabs. Softcover.

From the Back Cover

Learn Instantly from Step-by-Step Graphics!

We know a picture is worth a thousand words--so we went heavy on pictures and light on words in this easy-to-use guide. Color screenshots and brief instructions show you how to use Excel’s number-crunching features in no time. Follow along and learn to enter and format data, calculate with functions and formulas, create charts and graphs, analyze data, and more. Each chapter’s “How to” list and color-coded tabs make it easy to flip straight to the tasks you need to do. Get the book that gets you started using Excel right away.

In Each Chapter:

• Shortcuts for accomplishing common tasks
• Helpful reminders or alternate ways of doing things
• Bonus information related to the topic being covered
• Errors and pitfalls to avoid
• Screenshots with captions show and explain exactly what you’ll see on your computer screen while you’re doing a task

John Cronan has more than 18 years of computing experience. He has worked on more than 20 books, including Windows XP: A Beginner’s Guide, FrontPage 2003: The Complete Reference, Excel for Windows 98 Made Easy, and Office 2000 Answers: Certified Tech Support.

About the Author
Series editors Martin and Carole Matthews each have more than thirty years of computing experience. They have written 57 U.S. editions of 32 titles, a number of which have been critically acclaimed. Among their more recent books are: Windows XP, A Beginner’s Guide; FrontPage 2002: The Complete Reference; Windows 2000, A Beginner’s Guide; Office 2000 Answers, Certified Tech Support; Windows 98 Companion; and Windows 98 Answers, Certified Tech Support.

Customer Reviews

A effective training tool for Excel tutors
This particular series of instructional books (meaning the "QuickSteps" series) has always been one of my favorites -- they're concisely written in short paragraphs with decent descriptive pictures to help anyone learn just about any type of software application.

While I found this book to be fairly complete, I'd still only recommend it as a desk-side reference manual to use along with Microsoft tutorials themselves. While it is a cleverly written book that is not as cumbersome to use as other reference books on the market, it does not address all of the finer points of Excel.

All in all, it's a great reference book, and let's face it, sometimes it's just easier to review a chapter a few times to digest material rather than stare at a computer screen until you become cross-eyed.

All in all, I'd probably give this book a 4.5, but since that's not an option, I'll have to stick with 4 stars.

Great Tool
I don't use Excel all the time. But when I do I don't have time to troubleshoot problems.

This hands-on, user friendly book has helped me conquer Excel. The text is readable and well organized. The visuals are clean and fully support the instructions.

I found that you can start from the beginning and teach yourself EXCEL with simple step by step instructions or you can flip straight to your topic of interest and further build your skills. This is a great tool for all levels of expertise.

Review From A Psychology Student
I'm a soon-to-be-graduating Psychology student at the University of Washington and I am writing this review from the perspective of some one using excel in Social Sciences.

I found this book extremely suited to my needs...each step was very clear and precise and it was easy to find the chapter or section that was most applicable to what I was working on.

It covered all of the functions of Excel that I have used in my classes thus far. Although my intro. classes had a very brief introduction to the functions I needed, as I progressed into higher level classes and used more and more Excel I found that I needed additional specific instructions for my work. This book was very helpful in that way, and saved me the bother of forever emailing questions to my professor, as I had done before I received the book.

I actually used Excel the most to analyze the significance of data from an experiment that I had designed and to graph the results. This required quite a few steps and it was helpful to have a guide to look at as I went as opposed to trying to guess what came after the basic skills I had previously learned.

I also lent this book to a friend who works in American Ethnic Studies and used Excel to organize and make tables of data for her thesis. The American Ethnic Studies major has no background in science, so was in the position of having absolutely zero knowledge of Excel. However, with this book alone, she was able to complete the Excel portion of there thesis without any additional help.

From a student's point of view, this is a great resource if your field involves any use of Excel.