MBA's Guide to Microsoft Excel

You are unique among readers. Almost nobody reads the introduction to a book like this. However, you’ll richly benefit by taking a few minutes to read through this introduction. Its purpose is to help you maximize your return on the investment you’ve made in this book—your investment in money and especially your even more costly investment in time.

Why This Book

Bookstore shelves are packed with guides to Microsoft® Excel, the world’s most popular spreadsheet program. So why this book? Because although many fine books have been written about Excel, there really isn’t a book specifically for business users of Excel. In fact, if you don’t count this title, only two types of books are available: One, you have the books such as Excel for DummiesTM, which are really for beginners with computer anxiety (and perhaps not something that you want out on your desk even if you fall into the targeted audience). Two, you have books such as Microsoft Press’s Running Excel, which cover at least a bit about every feature of Excel and thereby provide a wonderfully encyclopedic explanation of Excel’s features but often don’t give the detailed commentary and advice useful to business people.

I don’t want to take anything away from these other categories. Many of the existing books in these two standard categories are very good. I heartily recommend both Excel for DummiesTM and Running Excel, for example, as general references. But business users of Excel benefit by having a reference that emphasizes, talks from the point of view, and focuses on the business applications of Excel. In short, business users of Excel need a book that talks about Excel as a business tool.

MBA’s Guide to Microsoft® Excel 2000 is the only book that specifically describes how you can more easily, more productively, and more powerfully use Microsoft® Excel 2000 in business.

Although this book’s title references the popular business professional degree MBA., this book will also be of use to people without MBAs. MBA students, for example, will find this book useful. People with graduate degrees in accounting, public administration, economics, and related fields will find this book useful as well.

In addition, anyone who’s finished a good undergraduate program in business or a related field (like accounting) will feel comfortable and gain skills using this book as a desktop reference.

What’s in This Book

The easiest way to see what’s in this book is to turn to the table of contents. It lists each chapter and each chapter’s contents in rich detail.

The chapters in this book fall into three parts:

Part One includes Chapter 2, “QuickPrimerTM on Using Excel,” and Chapter 3, “QuickPrimerTM on Charting,” which provide fast-paced but friendly tutorials on Excel. In a nutshell, these two QuickPrimersTM move you to professional proficiency in Excel—even if you’re new to Excel. (If you don’t need this help, of course, you can easily skip it.)

Part Two includes Chapters 4 through 9, which provide rich, detailed coverage of topics of interest to Excel business users—topics that are shortchanged in books that have to be everything to everybody. Chapter 5, for example, describes how you easily and correctly make financial and other business calculations in Excel. Chapter 6 describes how Excel’s advanced modeling tools work in business settings. Other topics covered in richer detail include statistics analysis, sharing data, and using the Small Business Finance Manager.

Part Three includes Chapters 10 through 15, which describe how to build real-life business workbooks using Excel and provide (via the companion CD at the back of the book) working examples of each. For example, Chapter 10 describes how to build a business planning workbook based on the BIZPLAN.XLS starter workbook included on the companion CD. Chapter 11 describes how to perform profit volume analysis and break-even analysis using the PROFVOL.XLS starter workbook also included on the companion CD.

What’s Not in This Book

Two topics aren’t covered to any great detail in this book. MBA’s Guide to Microsoft® Excel 2000 doesn’t describe how to create a flat-file database (also known as a list) in Excel. (However, you can download a free booklet that explains how Excel databases work. This booklet is available from Redmond Technology Press’s web site at www.redtechpress.com.)

One other topic that’s not covered is Excel’s built-in programming language, Visual Basic for Applications®. VBA, as it’s called, requires its own book. (If you’re interested in learning VBA, several excellent references exist, including any of Michael Halvorson’s books on programming with Visual Basic. Halvorson’s books, which are published by Microsoft Press, are available from walk-up and online bookstores.)

That’s it! That’s all you need to know before you begin using this book.

Stephen L. Nelson