Excel Hacks by David & Raina Hawley

Microsoft Excel is an extremely powerful tool. Yet most users have only scratched the surface of its power, using only a small part of its capabilities.

Excel Hacks: 100 Industrial-Strength Tips & Tools by David & Raina Hawley, shows readers how to do more, and how to do things better, with the market-leading spreadsheet. The word "hack" here refers to its original meaning in computers. A hack was either a "quick and dirty solution" or a "clever way of doing things", and didn't refer to breaking into systems. This book presents 100 different hacks spread over eight categories, covering the basics; built-in features; naming hacks; pivot tables; charts; formulas and functions; macros; and connecting Excel to the rest of the world.

Individually, none of these hacks may cause you to run down the street shouting "Eureka", but together they should help just about every Excel user. I consider myself an expert user, working with spreadsheets for over twenty years and teaching classes in Excel and 1-2-3, yet I was still able to learn a lot from this book. In some cases, it was genuinely new information (Hack #50, Explode a Single Slice from a Pie Chart or Hack #99, Access SOAP Web Services from Excel). In other cases, it showed how to use a tool I knew about in some different way (Hack #41, Create Custom Functions Using Names or Hack #78, Construct Mega-Formulas). A couple of times, it served as a reminder to use some tool that I had been neglecting (Hack #6, Customize the Template Dialog and Default Workbook).

Some of the hacks are usability tips, showing how other tools (such as pivot tables) will be more useful if you lay out data in a certain way. Several tips help if you develop spreadsheets for others to use, limiting their capacity to screw things up. Sometimes, the hacks may just spur you to further thought, making you think "Gee, if you can use this tool to do this, maybe with just a little more work I can get it do that!"

Article Author: Bruce Kratofil

Bruce Kratofil blogs on bugs and other things that can go wrong with your computer at The BugBlog, and writes about computers and economics at BJK Research

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