Recently, I received a copy of Excel Blackbelt and blogged about my excitement surrounding the book in a previous post. As I write this, I am roughly half way through the book and am looking forward to finishing it and writing part 2 of the review. Below are my comments on the first five chapters of the book.
Chapter 1 - Chapter one is basically a foundation chapter that sets the stage for the book. The chapter does contain five excellent principals from Edward Tufte’s Beautiful Evidence
book. I found it interesting that that author makes a point at the end of the chapter to state that the book is not:
- An advanced programming guide
- Statistics text
- Single source dictionary of all things Excel
He goes on to state that the book “is intended to be a guide for the sorcerer’s apprentice - for those professionals who want to demonstrate their own genius, and need only the right coaching”…etc. Someone could read this as, it covers a little bit of everything and not too much of anything. I guess it can be extremely difficult to write a book for an audience with a wide range of skills.
The last sentence is very fitting and something I believe exists. “It’s time to shatter the wall between the untouchable programmer and the professional in need”. So very true!
Chapter 2 - Contains very basic principals and a few more advanced concepts towards the end. Basic concepts like, formatting in Excel, how cells work, ranges, worksheets, comments, links and functions. More advanced concepts are: conditional formatting, VLOOKUP, OFFSET and MATCH. At this point, the author introduces practice problems at the end of the chapters. To me, this addition to the book seems to make it into a supplemental text for academia. I can relate to this chapter because I use the functions previously stated on a daily basis.
Chapter 3 - This chapter starts with an overview of importing a text file to Excel, which I think is extremely important because I also use this often. The next part that covers integrating Excel with MS MapPoint somewhat annoyed me. I have used MapPoint and am familiar with its functionality and value. What annoyed me was that Excel doesn’t come with MapPoint as it is a stand alone product, which isn’t in the MS Office suite. Also, there are better technologies out there today to integrate data and maps. I have found MapPoint to have visualization flaws, which is a topic for another day.
The section of the chapter that discusses online data sources and integrating or importing web data into Excel is valuable. What caught me off guard was that the text goes from 0-80 instantly when discussing Uniformly Distributed Randoms. I have many years of Statistics and could follow the heavy statistics principals, but think a lot of people may be lost. Don’t get me wrong, I think the section is extremely valuable, but could have been transitioned better.
Chapter 4 - Chapter 4 starts with the basics of Excel charting and especially bar charts. I like that the author points out some tips, like the fact that Excel can sometimes pick the wrong way to transform data into a chart. An illustration that I think is not effective is Figure 4.10. This Figure shows two firms’ inventory/sales by quarter for four years. I would never show this data in a dual series column chart. I would have chosen a line graph. Another idea that I would disagree with is using a stacked bar chart due to the baseline being difference for the second series. I have commented in previous posts about the ineffectiveness of stacked bars, which can be found using the search feature.
The next section shows a stacked bar chart with a background image of money on page 73. Unless very (very) subtle and for a good reason, I would never use a background image. Something that I think is worthwhile to point out is that it would greatly enhance the text if the pages or at least charts/images were in color.
Pages 76 and 77 discuss 3-D plots, which can be very tricky (ineffective) for data visualization. Also, the author gives the reader tips on how to upload images to use in a scatter plot instead of circles, which I would question. The section on pivot tables is pretty good and I definitely can relate to the author regarding his comments on pivot charts being limited.
Chapter 5 - Chapter 5 introduces the term Heuristics, which refers to “codified approaches to developing ideas/decisions/solutions”. In simple terms, this chapter discusses ways to improve decision-making through coding. This was an important chapter for me because this concept is something I practice regularly. Some of the concepts in this chapter become very advanced for the average user. Concepts and tools like, PCA (Principle Components Analysis), XLStat (an Excel statistical analysis add-on that runs about $500), P-Level, Z-Score, and Multidimensional Bins and Splits may not be common with many readers.
Other concepts that are discussed are MIN/MAX/STDEV/HLOOKUP (also VLOOKUP), which are extremely useful and I use all the time. I see this chapter as only useful for those that need to do heavy statistical analysis and not really for everyday Excel or spreadsheet users. Good concepts in theory or in a text book, but not that practical in the corporate world. I also understand the difficulty in being able to please everyone.
More to come!
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by John Tukey at Amazon.com
by John Tukey at Amazon.com
directly from the publisher. This book, which reminds of a college text book, just hit the book stores on July 7th. There are a few 
