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Excel Charts
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List Price: $44.99 Amazon.com Price: $31.49 
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Product Details
- Media: Paperback
- Publisher: John Wiley & Sons (05 November, 2002)
- ISBN: 0764517643
- Average Customer Review:
Based on 3 reviews.
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Amazon.com Sales Rank: 3,771
Customer Reviews
Yet another winner from WalkenbachI've gotten so much out of all of John's books I bought this one no questions asked. I've done a lot of custom charts via VBA and this book is a great help in quickly designing useful and complex charts w/o a lot of effort (just look up how John did it).
Errors, errorsThis book allots much space to stuff you find everywhere - what is a pivot table, for example - and on matters of conjecture and taste -does a pie chart "accurately" portray the data, for example. This space could be put to better use.
The section most interesting to me is Chapter 7 (30 pages) - Creating Interactive Charts. Unfortunately, there are errors. Some are only annoying, for example, on p. 213 telling us to enter Sheet1!Dates when the correct entry is =Sheet1!Date (plural is a typo, and no equals sign means no success). Simple errors, but I didn't like trial and error to discover the correct entry.
Other errors are tougher to fix, as on p. 228 where we are told to enter =N(OFFSET(Dates,(ROW(OFFSET($A$1 ... etc)) (I haven't filled in all the line). This procedure doesn't work at all, and an explanation of how it is supposed to work is "beyond the scope of the book". In trying to fix it, I found my own interactive graph that plots every N'th point and automatically adjusts to fit the selected data. Is a thank you in order?
Bottom Line: This book is padded and contains errors that consume much time.
Excellent
If your objective is to master the Charting feature of Excel, I bet that this book will exceed your expectations. Although most the material is advanced every user could benefit (The first Chapter offers a nice introduction to Excel Charts for novices).
Knowledge of formulas and named formulas is necessary for certain examples in the second part of the book. You will be amazed of how many ways there are to customize and improve your charts, you will do things that you never thought possible in Excel. Excel's help file and other books in Excel will never give you the tricks and the work-arounds that you will learn from Walkenbach's book. Some of the most interesting Chart Techniques are :
How to create combination Charts, how to Add a secondary axis,
How to put several Charts on the same Chart Sheet. Scrolling
charts, Self Expanding Charts. Adding Checkboxes to charts. Box
plot and How to plot Mathematical Functions in Excel.
I am sure that you will find many many more useful techniques.
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