Microsoft Excel 2013 Data Analysis and Business Modeling

Caveat: I am a student of Dr. Winston's at the University of Houston.About two years ago (before I started the MBA program) I felt like I could work my way around a spreadsheet. After purchasing the other popular excel books and working through them, they helped a lot. Then I took Dr. Winston's course(s) and realized that I only took away from the previous books what was applicable to my daily excel needs for my job. Now that I am finishing up the MBA program (final semester), I have started a consulting company using the exact methods out of this book that I learned in Dr. Winston's class.After reading the other reviews about how this book is challenging to get through, I completely agree. This is an advanced excel book. The big difference between this book and every other excel book (I have purchased several) is that the other ones teach you HOW to use excel. They walk you through the different formulas and teach you how to do them.This book teaches you the WHY while also teaching you the HOW. In other words, if you wanted to build a model to help a company maximize profit by determining which limited resources to put into play (labor, materials, $$) based on the revenue of each product, this book teaches you. This is the WHY (and was our week 1 homework problem in his class). In doing this you will learn how to use excel's solver model (constraints, changing cells, linear models, non linear...etc) , vlookups, nested if statements, and several other functions in excel. This is the HOW. So you get to learn a ton of the really cool functions in excel, how they work together in nested formulas, and how they could directly benefit a company/organization (just from one chapter).I am biased as I have learned quite a bit from Dr. Winston. There is a reason why he has won all of the awards that he has (google his name and Indiana University). He is very good at explaining these concepts to somebody like me that doesn't come from a heavy quantitative background.UPDATE 8/1/2015:I have recently spoken with Dr. Winston and he mentioned that he was in the process of putting his courses up online. He said that currently there are around 200 videos explaining lots of the topics in his books. I am not sure of the website, but once he tells me I will update this review again.UPDATE 8/17/2015:Spoke with Dr. Winston yesterday and he said that his site is up! Just checked it out and there is a lot of free content showing how to work some of the examples in his book. You can find it by googling excelwithwayne (fitting name). I'm jealous because I just paid a ton of money to take his classes when I could have just watched his videos.I am only posting this here because some of the reviews said that they would like to see the videos if possible. Not trying to sell anything as this is Dr. Winston's website and I am just an alum of his.

Just as bookkeeping software will not make you an accountant nor recipe software a chef, mere knowledge of Excel will not make you a mathematician or an MBA-trained manager. For those professions, you need much more in fundamental background knowledge and experience. That is why I enjoy this book of instruction so much. I teach an undergraduate Business Statistics course and an Introductory Management Science course at a State University Business College, but I do not teach Excel per se. My focus is on the basic mathematics of these subjects, a better understanding as to where the numbers come from and what they mean. Dr. Winston has managed to combine the instruction on how to use Excel with able instruction on the math behind the models and the formulas. In the introduction, he promises that, in addition to the Excel formulas, "... you will learn some important math in a fairly painless fashion." He delivers on that promise.The teaching methods used here - to provide templates so that the reader may follow and do step-by-step the creation of worksheets and models, or the reader may follow the narrative while referring to the sample worksheets illustrated - are very satisfying to the learner. For myself, sometimes a complex model requires me to recreate step-by-step the worksheet. However, at other times with less complex concepts, it is excruciatingly tedious to follow the step-by-step. I learn more by following the illustrations as I read along. So it seems to be with most of my own students.The technique of listing questions at the beginning of each chapter that will be answered by the information in the chapter is excellent. I believe it will beat my listing of lesson objectives at the head of each lesson plan as a motivator for students - will more strongly inspire curiosity as to what we are about to learn.

This looks like a useful book for analysing data and creating relationships. I only scanned the book so far, but it looks interesting. It's not as high skill level as I thought, so I'm a little disappointed.One large section of the book is dedicated to using Solver, which I have never used, so that could be useful.There is another section for Pivot Tables, with lots of details about them. I create formula based summaries, so I probably will only scan this section for some insight into any benefit they could provide, maybe through VBE. My understanding is they have to be recreated each time you edit the data.There were some sections showing line graphs that I hope are related to actual statistics gathering or visualizing. There were supposed to be done sections in creating different types of complicated graphs, as in dashboards, that I always find confusing, so that will be helpful for me.If you already know the basics of Excel, this is a good book to help with more data analysis. If you are advanced, this is a neat reference book that may have something new or different for you.

Nice

Recomendo para aqueles que querem se aprofundar no Excel para analise de dados e modelos de negócios..... livro super interessante

This book provides excellent examples, ways and/or best practices to use EXCEL in concrete business cases. This is a very useful book for business data analyst

I am plaisantly surprised at the amount of information in this book. It will become a bible for me as soon as I learn a bit more. It is very well explained and the exercices are just what I needed. It was delivered fast and in very good shape.

This is a great book for analysts. For practice you can use data from different industries available to download. I can't stress enough how helpful this book is. The practical examples of analysis in Excel like descriptive stats, regressions, ANova, use of pivot tables etc. are not limited to Excel 2013 only - you can use it for Excel 2010 also!