Guerrilla Data Analysis Using Microsoft Excel: Overcoming Crap Data and Excel Skirmishes

Bill Jelen, MrExcel and Oz du Soleil of Excel on Fire, two of the leading Excel channels on YouTube, joined forces to write a unique book to help you get the most from Excel and combat bad data. Guerrilla Data Analysis Using Microsoft Excel: Excel Skirmishes and Conquering Crap Data Third Ed. goes beyond Excel tips & tricks and includes real world warnings and case studies. The book opens with a review of Excel basics and moves on to show you: Pivot tables, Conditional formatting, Power Query, and Dynamic Arrays. And then there are what the authors call skirmishes: those aspects of working with Excel and data that aren’t directly Excel but are real world challenges that make your Excel work more difficult. The list of skirmishes include: The perils of diving into a project before checking data quality. Accepting the reality that data is never 100% clean, and deciding if your dataset is clean enough. Identifying duplicate records that will ruin your analysis. Deciding on your strategy based on a one-&-done need vs. an ongoing automated need. When asked about the motivation for this book, Oz replied: “this is for the person who’s been thrown into the fire with Excel and data. They may not have a background for this work but they still have to perform because the world doesn’t wait for you to graduate from beginner to intermediate and then to advanced. No. You have to perform and deliver.” In other words, GDA3 is a survival guide whether you’re new to Excel or a longtime professional who needs a reference guide. The book is light and quick, giving you bite-sized lessons, but going deep on critical topics like pivot tables and Power Query.

Oz du Soleil is an Excel MVP who has been working with Excel since 2001. Oz has several Excel courses on the LinkedIn Learning platform. He’s possibly best known for the dramatic and colorful Excel tutorials he posts on his YouTube channel Excel on Fire. Most recently, Oz has presented Excel topics and master classes at conferences in Amsterdam; Bulgaria; Brazil; Toronto; and cities around the United States. When Oz isn’t elbows-deep in the guts of a spreadsheet, he does storytelling around Portland, Oregon. He has told stories onstage for Risk!, Pants on Fire, Seven Deadly Sins, Pickathon, The Moth, and other storytelling shows. Bill Jelen is the host of MrExcel.com and the author of 61 books about Microsoft Excel including Excel Gurus Gone Wild, Pivot Table Data Crunching, and Excel 2019 Inside Out. He has made over 80 guest appearances on TV’s Call for Help with Leo Laporte and was voted guest of the year on the Computer America radio show. He writes the Excel column for Strategic Finance magazine. He has produced over 2200 episodes of his daily video podcast Learn Excel from MrExcel.