Introduction
Spreadsheets are such a mainstay in todayâs world; the term is almost a household word. Certainly in my home it is. And I donât just mean because I write books on Excel. Spouses use Excel to track household expenditures and insurance claims. A neighbor analyzes his eBay transactions in Excel. Our local merchant keeps tabs on his storeâs inventory on a worksheet.
In the workplace, Excel is one of the most commonly used analysis and reporting tools. Financial statements, sales reports, inventory, project scheduling, customer activity â so much of this stuff is kept in Excel. The programâs ability to manipulate and give feedback about the data makes it attractive.
About This Book
This book is about the number-crunching side of Excel. Formulas are the keystone to analyzing data â that is, digging out nuggets of important information. What is the average sale? How many times did we do better than average? How many days are left on the project? How much progress have we made? That sort of thing.
Formulas calculate answers, straight and to the point. But thatâs not all. Excel has dozens of built-in functions that calculate everything from a simple average to a useful analysis of your investments to complex inferential statistics. But you donât have to know it all or use it all; just use the parts that are relevant to your work.
This book discusses more than 150 of these functions. But rather than just show their syntax and list them alphabetically, I have ...
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