BKXL5SPR.RVW 940519 SAMS PUBLISHING 11711 N. College Ave., Suite 140 Carmel, IN 46032-5634 317-573-2500 317-581-3535 800-428-5331 800-428-3804 or 201 West 103rd St. Indianapolis, IN 46290 317-581-3718 fax: 317-581-4669 "Excel 5 Super Book", McFedries, 1994, 0-672-30385-X, U$39.95/C$52.95 This book certainly deserves the appellation of super. At over a thousand pages, one expects a fairly complete treatment of the subject, and this delivers. In addition, however, the book is thoroughly organized and gives advice and tips that go beyond mere program operation. The material is organized into a series of parts which form not only logical divisions of functions, but a progression in difficulty and probability of use. Part one covers the most basic functions of the spreadsheet: entering data, creating a workbook file, ranges, formulas and functions. At this point the author's tips concentrate on keystroke shortcuts, since users tend to switch from menu to keystroke commands within hours of starting to use the program. Part two moves into printing and display functions. This may seem strange to analytic types, but, as the vast majority of all computer work is still wordprocessing, so the bulk of Excel work tends to be the printing of tables. Topics include formatting, fonts, colour, views, and basic and advanced printing. Part three discusses the graphical functions and options while four looks at database work. Part five covers what everyone says they do with spreadsheets, data analysis. The book does not limit itself to a listing of available functions but gives helpful direction to the task. Parts six and seven detail programming, both in macros and in the Visual Basic language. Part eight looks at advanced topics, while nine details eight projects which give examples of the utility of the program. As well as tips and notes, the book also includes cautions. These are very well chosen, pointing out assumptions which the program makes that may not be immediately obvious to the user. (Just so that regular readers don't think I've gotten mellow in my old age, I did find some oddities on my way through. At the end of a chapter on printing we suddenly get an ad for Que books. And a screen shot illustrating the slide show function is completely unintelligible.) copyright Robert M. Slade, 1994 BKXL5SPR.RVW 940519 ====================== DECUS Canada Communications, Desktop, Education and Security group newsletters Editor and/or reviewer ROBERTS@decus.ca, RSlade@sfu.ca, Rob Slade at 1:153/733 Author "Robert Slade's Guide to Computer Viruses" (Oct. '94) Springer-Verlag