Excel Data Analysis For Dummies, 2nd Edition

Introduction

So here’s a funny deal: You know how to use Excel. You know how to create simple workbooks and how to print stuff. And you can even, with just a little bit of fiddling, create cool-looking charts.

But I bet that you sometimes wish that you could do more with Excel. You sometimes wish, I wager, that you could use Excel to really gain insights into the information, the data, that you work with in your job.

Using Excel for data analysis is what this book is all about. This book assumes that you want to use Excel to learn new stuff, discover new secrets, and gain new insights into the information that you’re already working with in Excel — or the information stored electronically in some other format, such as in your accounting system or from your web server’s analytics.

About This Book

This book isn’t meant to be read cover to cover like a Dan Brown page-turner. Rather, it’s organized into tiny, no-sweat descriptions of how to do the things that must be done. Hop around and read the chapters that interest you.

If you’re the sort of person who, perhaps because of a compulsive bent, needs to read a book cover to cover, that’s fine. I recommend that you delve in to the chapters on inferential statistics, however, only if you’ve taken at least a couple of college-level statistics classes. But that caveat aside, feel free. After all, maybe Dancing with the Stars is a rerun tonight.

What You Can Safely Ignore

This book provides a lot of information. That’s the nature of ...