Excel Basics to Blackbelt: An Accelerated Guide to Decision Support Designs

Excel Basics to Blackbelt is intended to serve as an accelerated guide to decision support designs. Its structure is designed to enhance the skills in Excel of those who have never used it for anything but possibly storing phone numbers, enabling them to reach to a level of mastery that will allow them to develop user interfaces and automated applications. To accomplish this, the major theme of the text is “the integration of the basic”; as a result readers will be able to develop decision support tools that are at once highly intuitive from a working-components perspective but also highly significant from the perspective of practical use and distribution. Applications integration discussed includes the use of MS MapPoint, XLStat and RISKOptimizer, as well as how to leverage Excel’s iteration mode, web queries, visual basic code, and interface development. There are ample examples throughout the text.

Dr Elliot Bendoly is an Associate Professor in Information Systems and Operations Management at Emory University's Goizueta Business School. Prior to academia he worked as a research engineer for the Intel Corporation. He holds a PhD from Indiana University in the fields of Operations Management and Decision Sciences, with an Information Systems specialization in ERP and Knowledge Management. His research has been published in a wide range of elite academic journals including the Journal of Operations Management, the Journal of Applied Psychology, Production and Operations Management, Information Systems Research and MIS Quarterly, among others (full vita at www.bizbreed.com). Dr Bendoly is also the co-editor of Strategic ERP Extension and Use (Stanford University Press, 2005) which complements the 2008 Cambridge University Press text catering to the ramp up of tool-developer skills and the integration of applications such as Map Point, XL State, and RiskOptimizer in Excel for decision support system creation. His current research focuses on operational issues in IT utilization and behavioral dynamics.