J-Walk & Associates, Inc.

Poor Guy

Debra, at Contextures Blog, periodically searches Twitter for entries about Excel. She found one that mentions one of my books.

Old man on the subway is reading Excel 2000 Power Programming with VBA. Poor guy.

Indeed. He really should upgrade to a later version of Excel.

Excel 2007 Book Excerpts Are Available

I just found out that Wiley has made available quite a few excerpts from some of my Excel 2007 Books.

These excerpts are all at Microsoft's site. They are in *.MHT format, so you'll need Internet Explorer to read them. Or, you can download the files and open them with Microsoft Word.

Excerpts from Excel 2007 Charts:

• A chart maker's check list
• Adding lines and backgrounds to a chart
• Chart accuracy
• Charting a noncontiguous range
• Creating a box plot
• Creating a comparative histogram
• Creating a multiline category axis
• Creating a thermometer chart
• Creating a timeline
• Displaying multiple charts on a chart sheet
• Don't be tempted by 3-D charts
• Introducing Excel charts
• Problems with pie charts
• Understanding series names
• Using time-scale axes

Excerpts from John Walkenbach's Favorite Excel 2007 Tips & Tricks:

• Annotating a chart
• Creating worksheet-level names
• Dealing with missing data in a line chart
• Knowing when to use absolute references
• Knowing when to use mixed references
• Making a worksheet "very hidden"
• Returning the last nonblank cell in a column or row
• Summing across sheets
• Understanding workbooks versus windows
• Updating old fonts
• Using AutoSum tricks
• Using the status bar selection statistics feature
• Various methods for rounding numbers

Excerpts from Excel 2007 Bible:

• Applying number formatting
• Creating your first worksheet
• Getting to know the formatting tools
• How Excel handles dates and times
• Understanding array formulas
• Understanding custom Excel templates
• Understanding formula basics
• Understanding workbooks and worksheets
• Using different fonts

Excerpts from Excel 2007 Formulas:

• Using Lookup Functions
• Working with Names

A Book In A Blog Post

New from Google. The ability to post a book in a blog post. Like this:

My First Kindle Book

My Excel VBA Programming For Dummies is now available in a Kindle Edition.

The price is $9.99, compared to $16.49 for the paperback edition.

Kindle is Amazon's wireless reading device, which also provides free Internet access. I'm very tempted to buy one.

Two New Translations

I recently received copies of two of my book translations. I hardly ever never know when a book is being translated. On rare occasions, a translator will contact me with questions. But mostly, the translated books are surpises.

• Excel 2007 PL Formuly - Translated into Polish by Lukasz Piwko and Wojciech Demsk
• Excel 2007 Grande Guida Per Il Professionista - Translated into Italian by Anna Rizzon, Carolina Figini, and Pier Franco Chillin

I'm almost always impressed with the translated books, even though I can't read them. An amazing amount of work is involved translating all files and re-doing the screen shots.

Sometimes I wonder who these translators are. Just for fun, I Googled the three people who translated the Excel 2007 Bible into Italian.

• Anna Rizzon has written at least one book. She's also made a few contributions to Wikiwords and (if this site is accurate) she earns 7.4 cents per word.
• Here's the resume of Carolina Figini (Word file), and her listing at Translators Cafe. Plus, an online petition that she signed.
• Pier Franco Chillin wrote an least one book, HTML in Your Pocket.

Missing File Posted

If you purchased a copy of Excel 2007 Formulas, you might have discovered that the CD-ROM is missing a workbook file that lists and describes all of the worksheet functions. You can download it here: Excel 2007 Function List.

The data is arranged in a table, with the following columns:

• Function Category
• Function Name
• Description
• New?
• Help Topic ID
• Help Link

Click the link in the Help Link column, and your browser opens to the corresponding Help topic at Microsoft's site.

Just for fun, I created a pivot table that counts the functions by category, and applied the Data Bars formatting: