Today lets talk about Excel books. The question is simple.
What is your favorite Excel book? Please share your answers using comments.
I will go first.
My favorite Excel books
Since I use a variety of Excel features, I have not one but 5 favorite books.
Excel 2010 Bible by John Walkenbach
This is an all round book that offers excellent details, examples and feature explanations. You can get the same book for 2007 or 2013 too.
Excel Power Programming book by John Walkenbach
This is my go to book for all things VBA. I have it on my desk most of the time and just flip thru it to grasp a new concept or solidify something I already know.
DAX Formulas for Power Pivot by Rob Collie
This is my go to book for Power Pivot. I must have read it a dozen times already and just love Rob’s prose & explanation style.
Information Dashboard Design by Stephen Few
More on design level. I rely on this book to come up with amazing dashboard designs you see here.
And of course, I got to love my own The VLOOKUP book. It is a comprehensive book on Excel lookup formulas.
What about you?
Go ahead and tell us what is your favorite Excel book? Share using comments please. Click here to post your comment.
More recommended Excel books:
If you are looking to get an Excel book (always a good idea), apart from those mentioned above, I also recommend these books.
Note about book links: All the book links mentioned in this post are affiliate links. That means if you purchase the book after clicking link on my page, I will get a few cents commission from Amazon. I recommend these books because I read them several times, I really love them, and I would have recommended them even if there is no affiliate commission.
7 Responses to “Project Dashboard + Tweetboard = pure awesomeness!!!”
I would like to see actual hash-tagged DM tweets go out to the specific information consumers. That would be an interesting way to communicate the key daily data to interested parties.
A Twitter-like secure application like Yammer might be a good fit with this.
For example, how about daily tweets to selected user groups (secure) that would display sales, bookings, cash receipts, cash disbursed and a second version that would show the same info for MTD, QTD or YTD figures.
@Dan, it would be great. I did not taught about implementing it on this dashboard because twitter is blocked to the whole intranet here. However, there's a discussion here about how can we send these tweets to blackberries (probably through e-mail) automatically. (I'd like to see this implemented on a jabber restricted network as well, but here it'll probably not happen)
The wrap-up versions you mentioned doesn't apply to my particular scenario, but on a sales tweetboard it would be a great tool indeed - choosing who will receive which message according to hashtags. I'll think on something, thanks for the advice. 🙂
(Ah, btw, I'm Fernando... 🙂 )
@Dan: That is a fun idea. Instead of tightly integrating twitter functionality with a dashboard, i think it would be cool if we have a "tweet this" button that users can click after selecting a range of cells. We can easily show a dialog with the concatenated output of the selected cells and ask user to edit the text and eventually "send to twitter".
For eg. you can select the annual sales figure cell and click on "tweet this" button upon which a dialog will show the value. Then you can pre-pend it something like "DM @boss look at our sales this year: "
@Aires.. thanks once again.
Wow it looks really good. Not sure though how much the tweet facility would help in real world project management, but certainly having a dashboard on a project should be a key deliverable when learning how to manage a project
The other use of this is during the software development life cycle especially when you have parallel streams of development and testing going on. Using a dashboard is a quick way for everyone on the team to see where the project is at and how it all fits together.
Regards
Susan de Sousa
Site Editor http://www.my-project-management-expert.com
Hi Chandoo,
I purchased the project management toolkit but the dashboard shown above with the imbedded scroll bars. Is it included in the project pack??
Thanks
Sue
The gantt chart section of this dashboard is similar to one I have recently created: http://xlcalibre.com/hr-dashboard-gantt-chart-traffic-light-reportIt has a similar approach with scroll bars, but has a couple of additional features. I've tried to incorporate a traffic light report element, and also allow the timescale to adjusted so that can view it by days, weeks or months.I really like the other tables that you've incorporated, I may well try to replicate them to improve my version!
I am a monitoring and evaluation consultant in international development, and one of the services I offer is to help non-profits and foundations develop performance dashboards. I often advise them to develop dashboards for ongoing programs, rather than for one-time or pilot projects, because of the time involved. I am trying to find out from a few people how long it takes you to develop a project management dashboard, and to what extent the indicators vary from one project to the next.