Excel Basics to Blackbelt – Part 2
Related – Excel Blackbelt Review – Part 1
This isn’t much of an analysis after the part one review. To be quite honest, the second half of this book is not really up my alley and would not be the best use of my limited time.
I think the first 6 chapters were beneficial and helped me in a few different areas. I got through chapter 6, which I thought was really good and got me thinking about trying to use Excel’s Solver more. Here are the chapters that I didn’t get to so you can judge for yourself if this text is for you.
Chapter 7 – Complex Optimization
Chapter 8 – Controlled Simulation Analysis
Chapter 9 – Scenario Generation and Optimization
Chapter 10 – Visualizing Complex Analytical Dynamics
Chapter 11 – VB Editing and Code Development
Chapter 12 – Automating Application Calls
Chapter 13 – Guided and User-Friendly Interfaces
When skimming the last chapters, I found them to cover very scientific topics, functionality and practices. The chapters were not geared towards the everyday business analyst in the corporate sector. Even chapter 10 on analytical visualizations was too scientific for me to really get much use from. If you are in engineering, heavy statistics or science, it may be helpful.
As I stated in the previous review, I didn’t like the fact that this book is about Excel, but many of the sections discuss other software products like, MapPoint, XLStat and RISKOptimizer, which are not part of Excel. A more accurate title would not have included the word "Excel" and just left it as "A Guide to Decision Support Designs".
Click here to see a few other reviews of this book at Amazon.com.
