randomosity

Excel 2010 Data Ana­lysis and Busi­ness Mod­el­ing Third Edi­tion by Wayne L Win­ston offers an impress­ive amount of real applied know­ledge within a handy volume. Win­ston deliv­ers an author­it­at­ive and exhaust­ive tome that func­tions as a superb ref­er­ence source — the breadth of mater­ial covered is very impress­ive. It is quite appar­ent that the third iter­a­tions has make for a finely tuned volume. The struc­ture of chapters provide a semi-cookbook style begin­ning with a ‘Ques­tions answered in this chapter’ sec­tion which gives a use­ful and applied scope to each chapter. There fol­lows very use­ful hands-on examples, with con­clud­ing ‘test’ ques­tions to rein­force the les­son. Chapter length is short and too the point.

Over­all, the ‘les­sons’ are delivered suc­cinctly and with dir­ect applic­a­tion, which I found very use­ful. Although it is tar­geted at Excel 2010 and I am a 2011 on OSX user, much of it was imme­di­ately prac­tic­able and I could make allow­ances for slight user inter­face vari­ances, thus mak­ing this a good tool for both Win­dows and OSX users. This is not the sort of book that you read from begin­ning to end, but rather a ref­er­ence source to give you a solu­tion to the prob­lem at hand.

From a didactic stand­point, this volume does provide a good ground­ing in the prin­ciples behind ana­lysis and ways in which you can inter­pret the res­ults gen­er­ated by Excel. Although it begins very much as an Excel manual to estab­lish a basing ground­ing in neces­sary func­tions and Excel’s way of doing things it quickly adopts a strategy to address real busi­ness mod­el­ing and data ana­lysis chal­lenges and chapters gear them­selves towards these prac­tic­al­it­ies. This is a hefty volume and dir­ec­ted towards hands-on busi­ness pro­fes­sion­als with a spe­cific application.