Comments about O'Reilly Media Head First Excel:

Sincerely, this book does a fair job explaining the basic usage of spreadsheet program and some good practice.

However, I would like to remind people that Excel is not the only spreadsheet program on earth. There are several alternative programs using exactly same paradigm.

Among them, I just want to talk about a free (in sense of beer as well as in sense of speech) program called OpenOffice.org Calc. It is part of OpenOffice.org.

OpenOffice.org (http://www.openoffice.org/) is an office suite supports Windows, Linux, Mac OS X and Solaris. It is free of charge! It contains most features of Microsoft Office, in particular, it can create PDF files. It has its own extensive repository of extensions and templates. It doesn't use Ribbon UI (why bother?). It wouldn't charge you too many disk space.

Moreover, OpenOffice.org is available legally in the form of portable app (http://portableapps.com/). You can put it in your flash driver and use it freely in any Windows computers (with USB support).

The only critical caveat is, it may not always open Microsoft Office files flawlessly. However, if your only need is viewing. Use Microsoft's free viewer or use an online conversion site.

If you have an authorized, relatively new version of Microsoft Office. Please ignore me. Otherwise, you may give OpenOffice.org a try.

I know the words above sounds like AD. But I don't get paid. I'm just trying to point out the very fact that doing things mentioned in this book requires no software purchase.

I expect that there will be odds if you follow this book using OpenOffice.org. To resolve the issue, I will give some notes for OpenOffice.org after I finish reading the entire book.

Comments about O'Reilly Media Head First Excel:

Copy and paste this link for the labs.

http://www.headfirstlabs.com/books/hfexcel/#code

Comments about O'Reilly Media Head First Excel:

Didn't really like the way this book is designed. Too much distractions with the pictures of people and there thought clouds. If you are a real novice, it might interest you and would teach you the basics, but anybody who knows Excel will probably get fed up of it quite quickly.

Comments about O'Reilly Media Head First Excel:

Good book, but shame about the site links ... they don't work. Nor does the link suggested in the response to the second reviewer

Comments about O'Reilly Media Head First Excel:

I thought the book was very helpful in places. The writing is user-friendly and keeps the reader engaged. The book is easy to read and follow.

I have only two problems with the book:

1. The links within the .pdf don't work, so you need to download the entire file package and load the files from your hard disk. This isn't such a big deal

2. Many of the features aren't included in the Mac versions of Excel yet. This certainly isn't the author's fault, but it does tempt you about all this cool stuff that the Mac version doesn't do

Overall, I'd recommend the book for someone learning Excel (such as me)

Comments about O'Reilly Media Head First Excel:

I have been trying to download the forms to no avail. The book is great however the automation links are inept.