Get a FREE fully-working copy of Steganos Security Suite 7 (worth £49.99) when you sign up to the Practical PC Newsletter. Review: Analyzing Business Data with Excel
Iain Laskey examines a book aimed at business professionals who want to get the most from Excel's power.
| Product | Analyzing Business Data with Excel |
|---|---|
| Company | O'Reilly |
| Web | www.oreilly.com |
| Price | From £28.50 |
| We like | Straight to the point advice and guidence |
| We don't like | Nothing |
| Rating | 8/10 |
| Requirements |
Most people have used Excel at some time or another. However, in most cases the most advanced use they get out of it is totalling up a few columns or some very simple formulae. Whilst useful, this sort of thing is trivial to poor old Excel who is capable of vastly more. In this book, Gerald Knight hopes to show how to really make Excel work hard for you. In some ways, the title is misleading as most of the techniques can be used for handling any data, not just business related so scientists and hobbyists may find much of use here.
What you're not going to learn is how to do the basics - the book warns that it is only for experienced users and this warning should be taken seriously. It dives straight in and takes no prisoners.
Each chapter covers a particular area such as statistics, pivot tables and problem solving, workload forecasting, queuing and so on. The chapters start with an outline of the problem before showing how to use Excel to best effect, often using features and functions that few people even know exist. The result is some pretty powerful 'applications' written purely using Excel and utilising its built in functions as well as VBA (Visual Basic for Applications) where needed.
There are screen shots aplenty, often featuring in-progress sheets to illustrate how the formulae are used to construct the model and in some cases just a skeleton sheet showing how a function is used.
Chapter 10 was particularly welcome and covers importing data from a variety of sources including delimited files, XML or directly via ODBC from databases such as SQL Server. The following chapter offers a discussion on cleaning data and turning it in to something easier to work with. Different dates and numeric formats are covered as is a method for analysing strings to produce an equivalence value - a number that describes how similar they are. For example, Iain Laskey and Ian Laskey are very close and may have an equivalence of .95% or greater. On the downside, the author cops out slightly and says 'here is the VBA, don't ask how the algorithm works, it's beyond the scope of the book'.
The final chapter offers some basic tips on optimising the look of the output to help draw the eye to important areas and to make interpretation as easy as possible - a nice touch.
The majority of the content covers different ways of manipulating numerical data so it is rather heavy on statistics and trend analysis. In many cases, the solutions provided turned huge amounts of difficult to understand raw data in to graphs of different types making the interpretation of the data much easier. Some of the methods used to visualise are quite ingenious and were a real eye opener for me as were the ways to make sheets far more interactive allowing a user to drill down to more levels of detail. For any business, the ability to do this is paramount to efficient operation and an Excel guru armed with this book will make a pretty powerful combination when it comes to problem solving and analysis.
Even if you can't make use of all the techniques immediately, Analysing Business Data with Excel will at least make you aware of what is possible and provide useful building blocks for developing and structuring your own solutions.
At around £28.50, it's not the cheapest book out there on Excel but for anyone wanting to extend their Excel skills in to the genuine power user category and leverage the real power of Excel, this is a must-read.
