Advance Praise for Head First Excel “Head First Excel is awesome! Like other Head First books, it’s a very approachable mix of knowledge, business situations, and humor. Not only do you learn all you need to know about Excel, but you also get to learn some real business lingo and smarts as well. Need to create formulas? Need to make reports, charts, or pivot tables? This is the book for you. Head First Excel gives you the goods and will help you excel at Excel!” — K en Bluttman, www.kenbluttman.com “Head First Excel shows how to fully utilize some of the best features Excel has to offer to improve productivity and data analysis skills. If I’ve been using Excel for over 10 years and still found many useful topics, so can you, regardless of your experience level.” — A nthony Rose, President, Support Analytics “Do you use Excel to keep lists and calculate the occasional budget? Would you like to dive deeper and learn how Excel can give you an edge in your daily workflow? Unlock your Excel superpowers with Michael Milton’s Head First Excel. You’ll learn to create data visualizations and design spreadsheets that make your point and get you noticed. Discover how to easily audit complex formulas written by others, so you can quickly validate (or call ‘B.S.’ on) their calculations. Build models that optimize your business and/or finances based on all possible scenarios. Excel’s many features can seem intimidating; Michael cuts through the complexity and teaches you to bend Excel to your will.” — B ill Mietelski, software engineer Praise for other Head First books “Kathy and Bert’s Head First Java transforms the printed page into the closest thing to a GUI you’ve ever seen. In a wry, hip manner, the authors make learning Java an engaging ‘what’re they gonna do next?’ experience.” —Warren Keuffel, Software Development Magazine “Beyond the engaging style that drags you forward from know-nothing into exalted Java warrior status, Head First Java covers a huge amount of practical matters that other texts leave as the dreaded ‘exercise for the reader.’ It’s clever, wry, hip and practical—there aren’t a lot of textbooks that can make that claim and live up to it while also teaching you about object serialization and network launch protocols.” —D r. Dan Russell, Director of User Sciences and Experience Research IBM Almaden Research Center (and teaches Artificial Intelligence at Stanford University) “It’s fast, irreverent, fun, and engaging. Be careful—you might actually learn something!” —K en Arnold, former senior engineer at Sun Microsystems Coauthor (with James Gosling, creator of Java), The Java Programming Language “I feel like a thousand pounds of books have just been lifted off of my head.” —Ward Cunningham, inventor of the Wiki and founder of the Hillside Group “Just the right tone for the geeked-out, casual-cool guru coder in all of us. The right reference for practi- cal development strategies—gets my brain going without having to slog through a bunch of tired, stale professor- speak.” —T ravis Kalanick, founder of Scour and Red Swoosh Member of the MIT TR100 “There are books you buy, books you keep, books you keep on your desk, and thanks to O’Reilly and the Head First crew, there is the penultimate category, Head First books. They’re the ones that are dog-eared, mangled, and carried everywhere. Head First SQL is at the top of my stack. Heck, even the PDF I have for review is tattered and torn.” — B ill Sawyer, ATG Curriculum Manager, Oracle “This book’s admirable clarity, humor, and substantial doses of clever make it the sort of book that helps even nonprogrammers think well about problem solving.” —C ory Doctorow, co-editor of Boing Boing Author, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom and Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town Praise for other Head First books “I received the book yesterday and started to read it…and I couldn’t stop. This is definitely très ‘cool.’ It is fun, but they cover a lot of ground and they are right to the point. I’m really impressed.” — E rich Gamma, IBM Distinguished Engineer Coauthor, Design Patterns “One of the funniest and smartest books on software design I’ve ever read.” — A aron LaBerge, VP Technology, ESPN.com “What used to be a long, trial-and-error learning process has now been reduced neatly into an engaging paperback.” — M ike Davidson, CEO, Newsvine, Inc. “Elegant design is at the core of every chapter here, each concept conveyed with equal doses of pragmatism and wit.” — K en Goldstein, Executive Vice President, Disney Online “I ♥ Head First HTML with CSS & XHTML—it teaches you everything you need to learn in a ‘fun coated’ format.” — S ally Applin, UI designer and artist “Usually when reading through a book or article on design patterns, I’d have to occasionally stick myself in the eye with something just to make sure I was paying attention. Not with this book. Odd as it may sound, this book makes learning about design patterns fun. “While other books on design patterns are saying, ‘Bueller… Bueller… Bueller,’ this book is on the float belting out ‘Shake it up, baby!’” — E ric Wuehler “I literally love this book. In fact, I kissed this book in front of my wife.” — S atish Kumar Other related books from O’Reilly Head First Data Analysis Analyzing Business Data with Excel Excel Scientifc and Engineering Cookbook Access Data Analysis Cookbook Other books in O’Reilly’s Head First series TM Head First Java Head First Object-Oriented Analysis and Design (OOA&D) Head First HTML with CSS and XHTML Head First Design Patterns Head First Servlets and JSP Head First EJB Head First PMP Head First SQL Head First Software Development Head First JavaScript Head First Ajax Head First Physics Head First Statistics Head First Rails Head First PHP & MySQL Head First Algebra Head First Web Design Head First Networking Head First Data Analysis Head First 2D Geometry Head First Programming Head First Excel Wouldn’t it be dreamy if there was a book on Excel that could turn me into an expert while keeping me engaged and entertained? But it’s probably just a fantasy.... Michael Milton Beijing • Cambridge • Farnham • Kln • Sebastopol • Taipei • Tokyo Head First Excel by Michael Milton Copyright © 2010 Michael Milton. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. Published by O’Reilly Media, Inc., 1005 Gravenstein Highway North, Sebastopol, CA 95472. O’Reilly Media books may be purchased for educational, business, or sales promotional use. Online editions are also available for most titles (http://my.safaribooksonline.com). For more information, contact our corporate/ institutional sales department: (800) 998-9938 or the author Author of Head First Excel When Michael Milton’s friends were programming in BASIC and playing Leisure Suit Larry back in the 80s, he was creating charts in SuperCalc. His career has consisted mainly of helping people out by showing up with the right spreadsheet at the right moment, and he hopes that after reading Head First Excel, you’ll have the same experience. When he’s not in the library or the bookstore, you can find him running, taking pictures, brewing beer, or blogging at michaelmilton.net. viii Michael Milton