Analyzing Business Data with Excel: Forecasting, Statistics, and Data Management

by Gerald Knight

Book Overview

As one of the most widely used desktop applications ever created, Excel is familiar to just about everyone with a computer and a keyboard. Yet most of us don't know the full extent of what Excel can do, mostly because of its recent growth in power, versatility, and complexity. The truth is that there are many ways Excel can help make your job easier-beyond calculating sums and averages in a standard spreadsheet.

Analyzing Business Data with...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0596100736
• ISBN13: 9780596100735
• Release Date: February 2006
• Publisher: O'Reilly Media
• Length: 262 Pages
• Weight: 0.95 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 6.7" x 9.1"

Customer Reviews

Great Book, but where's the data?

Overall this is a good book, but it would be much nicer if they provided Excel worksheets with the data used in the book's examples. Some sample code is provided for dowload on Oreilly's website, but this does not include example data. Nonetheless, the book is worth looking at.

VERY VERY HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!!

Are you an experienced Excel user? If you are, then this book is for you! Author Gerald Knight, has done an outstanding job of writing a practical guide that shows you how to solve real-world business problems by taking Excel's data analysis features to the max. Knight, begins by covering averages, trends, correlation, distributions and array formulas. Then, the author examines pivot table basics and ways to modify data to make it work better with pivot tables. Next, he covers the application development process, worksheet organization, and forecasting techniques. The author continues by exploring regression, problem definition, analysis, model construction, and interpretation of results. He also works with statistical process control, X and Y charts, and application design. Knight, then examines data requirements, statistical techniques and logic, application design, and organization. Then, he shows you how to apply formatting, VBA, and logic in an application that measures worker performance in a queuing operation. The author continues the discussion of queuing with another application by focusing on the status of the queue. He also explains how to use Goal Seek and Solver for various kinds of problems. Knight next covers importing from text files, databases, and XML. Then, he examines common problems with dates, numeric information, dealing with data in report form, and equivalence problems. Finally, he covers display design, color combination, dealing with complexity, and visual consideration. This most excellent book keys directly on the needs of business users. More importantly, this book addresses the growing Excel data analysis market head-on.

An outstanding set of connections between Excel and standard business use

Gerald Knight's Analyzing Business Data With Excel provides an outstanding set of connections between Excel and standard business use. Plenty of 'how to' computer books focus on the fundamentals of learning Excel without applying these lessons to basic business data analysis: Analyzing Business Data With Excel solves this in using real- world business problems as examples. From pivot tables and charts to statistical analysis choices and applications which can be easily updated, no business user should be without Analyzing Business Data With Excel.

Exactly what I was looking for!!

As a strategy analyst I'm always looking for concise ways to present data and make it automated and professional-looking without lots of code that none of my clients can use. I agree with the previous reviewer, other books come at Excel and similar applications with a feature by feature breakdown so that in usage YOU have to work backwards to figure out how to apply software features to your problem. This book is organized by business problem and then proceeds to breakdown how your problem applies to the software solution. There is very useful code in some of the models, but nothing horribly difficult to implement. Excellent addition to my reference library. I've truly never seen a business data analysis book as well put together as this and I've been searching for years. You will not be disappointed.

Excel as taught from the business perspective

I like the viewpoint of this book; I have a business problem, now how do I attack that in Excel? So many books come at business problems from the perspective of a specific feature in the product. This book teaches the solution to a complex business data analysis problem through use of the features in Excel. Excellent! It's a small book. The text is a little terse, but that's ok. Screenshots are used sparingly. If what you want is a feature by feature breakdown of Excel then this book isn't for you. But if what you have is some data that you need to crunch and you don't know much about Excel then check this book out.