Microsoft Excel Formulas & Functions for dummies

Welcome! Today we’ll be reviewing Microsoft Excel Formulas & Functions for dummies by Ken Bluttman.

While this book may have a lower rating than most of the other books on this site, don’t let the stars fool you – this is still a fantastic book. When I was caught up in the very lengthy onboarding process at one of my jobs I had plenty of free time, and (thankfully) this book provided not only a welcome relief from the looming clouds of boredom, but also an interesting insight into wonderful world of Microsoft Excel. You might be thinking to yourself right now “Why would I want to read almost four hundred pages about spreadsheets??” – and while this is a valid question, consider for a moment just how often you use a tool like Microsoft Excel. If you’re anything like me, and work behind a PC, you likely use spreadsheets much more often than you would like to, and in that case getting nice and comfy with the internals of Microsoft Excel might not be such a bad idea. Now, lets say you don’t work behind a computer all day; I’d still be willing to bet that if you thought long and hard about it you could find at least one or two use cases for some kind of spreadsheet application, whether it be Microsoft’s product (Excel) or Google’s (Google Sheets).

Now that we’ve got the “why?” out of the way you might still be wondering – “How did anyone manage to write this much about Excel? Isn’t it just rows and columns? What am I going to learn?” and before I read this book I might’ve been in the same camp, I mean – how complex could could Microsoft Excel really be? Well, almost four hundred pages later and I can confidently tell you the answer is: very; and while most of us just stick to making nice looking spreadsheets (and using the occasional =SUM or even =VLOOKUP functions) the vast majority of its users don’t ever scratch below the surface to admire the sheer complexity of this program. For example – did you know Excel could saves you potentially hundreds of dollars (by using Excel functions like =IPMT and =PPMT to compare loan offers)? Or that Excel natively supports many different data science functions (like =STANDARDIZE and =SKEW)? Or even that Excel had built in functions to support fetching information about the computer its running on (like =DIRECTORY and =SYSTEM)? I didn’t either – until I read this book.

While I whole heartedly agree – reading about spreadsheets is very boring – this really is a book you need to pick up if you use Microsoft Excel (or even Google Sheets) in any meaningful way, it really is that helpful. In the end, I ended up deducting a star for two reasons: the first is that this book, despite the carefully considered layout and content in this book (and the masterful linguistic gymnastics the author performs in an attempt to retain the reader attention in a book about spreadsheets!) it is ultimately boring to read. Second, and while this may be an unfair critique of the book since it is made “for dummies” is that it only gives a passing mention to the power of VBScript-ing which is natively supported in most modern versions of Microsoft Excel. With that being said, I think the author did an overall great job with the book and it would be fair to say: don’t be a dummy and consider picking up this book today!