Excel 2002 For Dummies

by Greg Harvey, Rich Tennant (Illustrator)

Just because electronic spreadsheets like Excel 2002 have become almost as commonplace on today's personal computers as word processors and games doesn't mean that they're either well understood or well used. If you're one of the many folks who has Office XP on your computer but doesn't know a spreadsheet from a bedsheet, this means that Excel 2002 is just sitting there taking up a lot of space. Well, it's high time to change all that. One look at the Excel 2002 screen (with all its boxes, buttons, and tabs), and you realize how much stuff is going on there. Excel 2002 For Dummies will help you make some sense out of the rash of icons, buttons, and boxes that you're going to be facing day after day. And when you ready to go beyond spreadsheet basics, this guide will also introduce you to Most of all, Excel 2002 For Dummies covers the fundamental techniques that you need to know in order to create, edit, format, and print your own worksheets. In this book, you'll find all the information that you need to keep your head above water as you accomplish the everyday tasks that people do with Excel. This down-to-earth guide covers all these topics and Now, even if your job doesn't involve creating worksheets with a lot of fancy financial calculations or lah-dee-dah charts, you probably have plenty of things for which you could and should be using Excel. For instance, you may have to keep lists of information or maybe even put together tables of information for your job. Excel is a great list keeper and one heck of a table maker. You can use Excel anytime you need to keep track of products that you sell, clients who you service, employees who you oversee, or you name it.

384 pages, Paperback

First published March 13, 2001

Reviews

[Chris Jaffe · Rating 2 out of 5]

"Wow," you say - "This guy is so out of date that he's still using Excel 2002 on his computer?" No - don't be silly. I'm still using Excel 2000 on my computer. But this book is as close as my local library gets to my version of Excel.

The main thing I got out of this is that I already know how to do the things I want to do with Excel. There were plenty of things in here that I don't know how to do. Early on, I tried reading those parts carefully - but then I realized, "eh, I don't know why I'd ever need to know that" and so it became more of a skim as I went along.

The main reason I'm giving this only 2 stars: the thing I most wanted to see in this book wasn't here. I was hoping for a rundown of all the various mathematical functions you can do in Excel - like SUM or ABS or many, many more. I can do some, but keep forgetting all but the most basic ones. But ..... this book never covered that! Seems like a heckuvan oversight to me.

Well, the book did clue me into Insert-Functions so I can see a list of them. Not nothing, but not what I was looking for. And leaving out basic information does seem like quite a problem for a For Dummies book.