Excel Formulas: Halfwit to Hero

Formulas are the heart and soul of Excel, whether you’re using Excel to build a business, run a budget, or solve your math homework. In Excel Formulas: Halfwit to Hero you get a no-fluff introduction to the essentials of formula writing by master explainer and best-selling author Matthew MacDonald.

Learn by Doing: In the past, computer books were giant doorstops that could crush you if they fell from a high shelf. This isn’t that sort of book. Instead, you'll "learn by doing" with the exercises on the companion website (http://lab.halfwit2hero.com). Each chapter has at least one step-by-step tutorial that gets you to practice the new concepts you've learned before they can drop out of your brain. Yes, this approach requires more work than breezing through the book on your sofa while watching The Bachelor in the background. But the payoff is immense. Instead of ending this book as a person who’s "kind of" familiar with Excel, you’ll be someone who’s developed real Excel skills. And when someone asks you about an Excel formula feature, your reaction won’t be "That sounds vaguely familiar"—it will be "I tried that out myself."

The Twelve-Year-Old Test: Ever struggled to learn from a book, only to be frustrated by an obvious mistake or something that didn’t work right? To prevent these types of problems, every Halfwit to Hero book is double-checked by a genuine beginner. Excel Formulas: Halfwit to Hero has successfully passed the hardest beginner challenge: the twelve-year-old test. That means a motivated twelve-year-old successfully completely all of its tutorials, with only a minimum of adult help.

What You’ll Learn:

• How to perform calculations with ordinary numbers, amounts of money, dates, times, and even text.
• How to use named cells to organize your worksheets and clear up complicated formulas.
• How to use conditions to write formulas that make decisions and deal gracefully with bad data.
• How to use lookups to scan through tables of information and build worksheets that automatically fill in data.
• How to use shortcuts to find hidden formulas, track down errors, and watch Excel as it crunches the numbers in your formulas.

Best of all, you can start with this book even if you’re an Excel novice! The first chapter, “What You Should Already Know,” will fill you in on the four most essential Excel concepts before you get started with formulas.

About the Author

Matthew MacDonald has helped thousands of people learn to write code, build websites, and tame giant spreadsheets. He’s a three-time Microsoft MVP and the author of more than two dozen books for publishers including O’Reilly, McGraw-Hill, Apress, Microsoft Press, Wrox, and No Starch Press. He’s also taught the mystical ways of programming at Ryerson University and Sheridan College. Matthew’s Excel roots go deep—he published his first book about the wonderful world of Excel spreadsheets in 2005 and wrote the best-selling Excel 2013: The Missing Manual and the pop-science hit Your Brain: The Missing Manual. Matthew lives in Toronto with his wife and three daughters. You can contact him at matthew@prosetech.com.