Umlas B. This Isn't Excel, It's Magic!

International Institute For Learning – 2007, 214 pages
ISBN: 0979215323, 9780979215322Bob Umlas is a regular and valued contributor to numerous Excel user groups and mailing lists. Whilst I have never met him personally he has always been generous with his time and knowledge, and infinite with his patience. He is also one of the smartest guys you will meet and understands Excel and spreadsheets inside out.
This is only a little book (214 pages), but that certainly is not a criticism. Rather than filling many pages with fluff, Bob has produced a compact, but brilliantly useful book of shortcuts, formula secrets and tricks.
Amazingly there is no Visual Basic (macro) coding in this book. It is all done using Excel's built in features and formulae capabilities.
One thing I loved about this book is it tackles `real world' problems. Bob clearly understands the frustrating types of issues that the average excel user has to tackle on a day to day basis. The sort of annoying and time consuming problems the IT training department gloss over at the corporate Excel training classes.
Some of the tips are simple one liners - but that doesn't make them any less useful. Indeed I was constantly surprised at how often I was going "oh that is sooo cool" or "Hey, I didn't know you could do that!" and I have been designing and developing custom built spreadsheets for large corporations for over 15 years.
Is this book for you? Well that depends. This is not a book for Excel beginners or if you want to learn to write macros in Visual Basic. If you are the type of person who likes to have big chunky books on the shelf to look important and impress people, then this brilliant, pithy and simple book is also not for you.