Excel Vba Programming For Dummies Ebook
Norine Wiltshire
LinkedIn and 3rd parties use essential and non-essential cookies to provide, secure, analyze and improve our Services, and to show you relevant ads (including professional and job ads) on and off LinkedIn. Learn more in our Cookie Policy.
A theme of my blogging is to help people take control of their work through better Excel practices. It's not enough just to know lots of functions and walk through clean models. You're more likely to fix broken data sets, inherent clunky models, and wage overall guerrilla data analysis.
Danielle Stein Fairhurst, the book's author, shares this outlook. The principal consultant at Australia's Plum Solutions and founder of LinkedIn's Financial Modeling in Excel group, Danielle brings decades of modeling consulting and training to this book. (I learned of Danielle through her appearance on Excel.TV.)
Financial Modeling in Excel has plenty of battle-tested techniques for error-checking, formula validation, and so forth. Compare this to many courses, often taught by instructors with limited experience in the field, which only teach you how to use Excel when everything goes right. And if you've spent any time in an office, you know how important it is to be able to troubleshoot broken Excel models.
Danielle also discusses the challenges of inheriting, auditing, and sharing workbooks. What happens when you take a departed employee's spreadsheets and there is no documentation? How do you control coworkers from breaking your models? These "people" problems can be just as delicate as the spreadsheet design itself.
Excel is an easy target for many computer purists -- not quite a programming language, not a menu-driven application, it requires a set of practices largely its own. The problem is, many users dismiss Excel's shortcomings before learning all its functionalities.
Hidden rows? Cell references not updating? Danielle knows all the objections, and shows you how to overcome these alleged limitations. Ever use the Watch Window or the Inspect Workbook element? If not, you are missing some excellent spreadsheet audit tools baked right into Excel.
In around 300 pages, Danielle takes you from spreadsheet design principles to building and visualizing your very own financial models -- a lot of ground! The book reads like a distillation of decades of Danielle's experience, but there is plenty more to learn. I would suggest, for example, Excel TV's Dashboard Pro Course to expand your knowledge of data visualization (covered briefly in the book). Or take Jon Acampora's VBA Pro Course and learn how to automate routines in your modeling. Danielle also offers several forms of Excel training -- she'll even come on-site to your workplace! (Although I might prefer a trip to Sydney.)
Financial Modeling in Excel for Dummies is a great reference for analysts of all skill levels. While the content focuses on building financial models like income statements and budget pro formas, the principles apply to any variety of Excel modeling. Most chapters, in fact, could apply to nearly any model in Excel as much as they do to financial models.
64591212e2