Product Review: Chandoo's Formula 1 Excel Formulas E-Book
August 3, 2009 • JP • 1 Comment • Rate This Article
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I've been fortunate enough to receive a copy of Chandoo's Formula 1 E-book for review.
Dubbed "The fastest and funnest way to learn Excel formulas", the e-book "explains 75 very commonly used Microsoft Excel formulas in plain English." The author is Purna Duggirala, aka Chandoo, an Excel MVP (and commenter on this blog) who runs Pointy Haired Dilbert, a website for those interested in learning more about Excel and charting.
The e-book groups the functions into seven categories:
- Math
- Logical
- Text
- Lookup
- Statistical
- Date/Time
- Financial
You won't find any obscure functions here; only the most commonly used ones are presented here. Each function comes with an explanation of its behavior, the syntax for using it, and a few examples. Chandoo has also sprinkled some additional tips throughout the text.
Here's a screenshot of one of the pages:
The fonts are very creative, and they work to separate this e-book from the other dry-looking texts on Excel that exist out there. Another cool thing is you can copy and paste the formulas from the PDF directly into Excel.
I really like the way the e-book sticks to only the most common formulas, since those are the ones I use most often and therefore am more likely to need help with. It's also great if you don't know many formulas, to use as a tutorial to help you understand each function. Chandoo also shows examples from a few Excel 2007 functions, like AVERAGEIF and IFERROR. Missing from those examples are alternate formulas for those of us who don't use Office 2007.
For example, in Excel 2003 the alternative to IFERROR is
=IF(ISERROR(SUM(A1:A10)),"",SUM(A1:A10))
and the alternative to AVERAGEIF is
=SUMIF(A1:A20,">5")/COUNTIF(A1:A20,">5")
Overall a very good value and should prove useful when you are stuck trying to get a simple formula to work (which is more often than you might think).
A free preview of the e-book is available from Chandoo's Excel Formula Help Page. To purchase the e-book for $10, click here: Pointy Haired Dilbert Chandoo's Excel Formula E-Book
Disclosure: I receive a commission from every sale of the e-book purchased from the links on this site.
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