Preface

I coined the phrase Either you work Excel, or it works you! over a decade ago to describe how the average user gets pushed around when building and using spreadsheets. Even advanced Excel users can fall prey to what I call the death by a thousand cuts experience, where tasks are accomplished slightly inefficiently or in a repetitive fashion. The cumulative effect of both is that you accomplish less, maybe think Excel is too hard, or perhaps tell yourself you’re not smart enough to use spreadsheets. I’ve heard it all over the years, and so I have included numerous automation and productivity tips in this book to dispel all of those myths and issues.

I quickly exceeded the budgeted page count on every chapter. I am truly grateful to Packt for graciously allowing me to cover each topic in the depth that I felt was warranted. There’s always more that I could have written, but I aimed for a balance of being informative without being overwhelming.

You’ll see a couple mentions of programming code in this book, but almost all of the automation that I discuss involves code-free solutions. I want to empower you to create resilient spreadsheets that have better data integrity and require much less of your time.