Excel Annoyances

Introduction

October 2003 was a good month for me. I was well into a relationship that eventually resulted in an accepted marriage proposal, I’d just finished the first draft of one long book, I had seen my Excel Pocket Guide (O’Reilly) hit the store shelves, and I was fresh and ready to tackle another project. That’s when I got a call from Robert Luhn, who had recently come on board as an executive editor at O’Reilly. He asked if I’d like to put together a book proposal for O’Reilly’s retooled Annoyances series. We kicked around a few ideas and eventually came up with Excel Annoyances, the book you now hold in your hands. I liked the road paved by Steve Bass in PC Annoyances, and I liked the notion of reinventing it for Excel—so I did the proposal dance, bade my legal representatives to work out a contract, and sat down for some serious writing.

WHY WRITE EXCEL ANNOYANCES?

Here’s why: because practically everyone uses Excel. The installed base is huge, and it stretches across multiple versions of the program. In fact, many people prefer the earlier versions, or can’t afford to upgrade to the latest and greatest. That’s why we decided to cover every major version from Excel 97 to Excel 2003—which casts a pretty wide net.

Good thing, too, because the river of Excel annoyances runs deep and treacherous, populated by numerous species of sharp-toothed predators ready to chew up your data. How deep and treacherous? When we queried user groups across this fair land, we got 150 emails in ...