How do a room full of knowledge-jaded, experienced Excel Gurus and Excel 'aficionadi' write a book specifically for the Excel Beginner who has never even clicked the Excel icon before? Why...they invite someone who has never used Excel and ask her to record her experience, of course. Today, in Episode #1560, Bill 'MrExcel' Jelen begins our series on the book "Don't Fear The Spreadsheet" with a brief back story and then explanation as to why this book will get you onboard with Microsoft Excel Essentials in no time at all.
"Don't Fear The Spreadsheet:A Beginner's Guide To Overcoming Excel's Frustrations" by Tyler Nash, Kevin Jones, Tom Urtis and Bill Jelen Don't Fear the Spreadsheet
"This Book Makes Excel For Dummies™ Look Like It Was Written For Rocket Scientists!"
"Don't Fear The Spreadsheet:A Beginner's Guide To Overcoming Excel's Frustrations" by Tyler Nash, Kevin Jones, Tom Urtis and Bill Jelen Don't Fear the Spreadsheet
"This Book Makes Excel For Dummies™ Look Like It Was Written For Rocket Scientists!"
Transcript of the video:
Hey, welcome back to MrExcel netcast. I'm Bill Jelen.
This is Don't Fear the Spreadsheet, Episode number 0; New Book All right, thanks to all the people who wrote in and said 'hey where're the podcast been?' You know me anytime after writing a book, the podcast [ gonna high ] This is a cool book.
Now, if you are watching a podcast [ here podcast trigger ], this book is probably not for you because most of the books of [ writer, are from ] people use Excel all the time.
These Excel 20 hours a week, 40 hours a week, 60 hours a week.
They're advanced Excel books.
But this is a great story, we were having meeting couple of years ago and Tyler Nash who does copy editing for us, was sitting around this table listening to us, talking about all this excel stuff and she finally just have had enough.
She interrupted and she says 'you know, there's a lot of people don't know Excel'.
All right and there was dead silence.
Everyone around the room like, What!
She is like, you're thrown all these terms around in it and for someone who doesn't know Excel at all, this is just you're way above our head.
So at that point, we had an idea and I said 'All right Tyler here's what I want you to do, I want you to go open Excel, I want you to use Excel and every time that you run into some stupid question, something that doesn't make sense.
Write it down, all right and so that became the book.
Tyler went through and came up with a hundred questions, in there things that just you and I and all the people use Excel all the time take for granted but is incredibly intimidating, to someone who's completely new to Excel.
Right, just open Excel for the first time, can you do something in Excel.
You know there intelliSense kind of kicks in and like, why did it do that?
All right and so this is good.
Tyler wrote the questions and then three MVPs, myself, Tom Urtis and Kevin Jones, all took turns answering the questions and then we threw in some of our own things.
So, here's what we have, we have a book, full-color print right here in the United States.
It's on uncoated paper that makes it's easy to take notes, ended up with about 150 questions and answer.
Questions from Tyler's point of view and then answers from one of the MVPs.
So, there's also, three case studies there.
I believe that there's five levels of Excel users and the first two levels, level 1: 20% of the people all they do in Excel is, they open an attachment and click Print.
Level 2: All they do in Excel is, maybe do some formatting, maybe do some column widths and then email that attachment.
So, that's 40% of the people, 300,000,000 people who have never even entered a single formula in Excel.
Isn't that amazing?
All right so, this book is written for those 300,000,000 people.
If you have a job interview this afternoon, where you have to know Excel, get this book and go to Chapter 8.
It'll be a crash course on the things that your soon to be manager, wants you to know in Excel.
There're Chapter 9; every single way to do 9 important tasks, that's for the manager who is the control freak and wants you to do things exactly like he does.
Print the USA by Hess printing, full-color, 8.5"x 11".
Lots of screenshots throughout and inexpensive, all right.
This is a beginner book.
We're competing with Excel for dummies and others, so $14.95 for 200 full-color pages.
Check it out, we'll be doing some new podcasts here that support Don't Fear the Spreadsheet.
So you're gonna see some of these they're gonna be kind of easier topics but don't be surprised, I always say "the best Swordsman in the world should not fear the second best Swordsman".
"The best swordsman in the world should fear the person who has never handled a sword before" because we get all these bizarre questions things, that again you and I take for granted but are going to be off the wall.
You might just learn something, I know I did.
Hey, thanks for stopping by.
Watch for Don't Fear the Spreadsheets sprinkled in around the coming weeks...
This is the book that makes Excel for dummies looks like...
This is Don't Fear the Spreadsheet, Episode number 0; New Book All right, thanks to all the people who wrote in and said 'hey where're the podcast been?' You know me anytime after writing a book, the podcast [ gonna high ] This is a cool book.
Now, if you are watching a podcast [ here podcast trigger ], this book is probably not for you because most of the books of [ writer, are from ] people use Excel all the time.
These Excel 20 hours a week, 40 hours a week, 60 hours a week.
They're advanced Excel books.
But this is a great story, we were having meeting couple of years ago and Tyler Nash who does copy editing for us, was sitting around this table listening to us, talking about all this excel stuff and she finally just have had enough.
She interrupted and she says 'you know, there's a lot of people don't know Excel'.
All right and there was dead silence.
Everyone around the room like, What!
She is like, you're thrown all these terms around in it and for someone who doesn't know Excel at all, this is just you're way above our head.
So at that point, we had an idea and I said 'All right Tyler here's what I want you to do, I want you to go open Excel, I want you to use Excel and every time that you run into some stupid question, something that doesn't make sense.
Write it down, all right and so that became the book.
Tyler went through and came up with a hundred questions, in there things that just you and I and all the people use Excel all the time take for granted but is incredibly intimidating, to someone who's completely new to Excel.
Right, just open Excel for the first time, can you do something in Excel.
You know there intelliSense kind of kicks in and like, why did it do that?
All right and so this is good.
Tyler wrote the questions and then three MVPs, myself, Tom Urtis and Kevin Jones, all took turns answering the questions and then we threw in some of our own things.
So, here's what we have, we have a book, full-color print right here in the United States.
It's on uncoated paper that makes it's easy to take notes, ended up with about 150 questions and answer.
Questions from Tyler's point of view and then answers from one of the MVPs.
So, there's also, three case studies there.
I believe that there's five levels of Excel users and the first two levels, level 1: 20% of the people all they do in Excel is, they open an attachment and click Print.
Level 2: All they do in Excel is, maybe do some formatting, maybe do some column widths and then email that attachment.
So, that's 40% of the people, 300,000,000 people who have never even entered a single formula in Excel.
Isn't that amazing?
All right so, this book is written for those 300,000,000 people.
If you have a job interview this afternoon, where you have to know Excel, get this book and go to Chapter 8.
It'll be a crash course on the things that your soon to be manager, wants you to know in Excel.
There're Chapter 9; every single way to do 9 important tasks, that's for the manager who is the control freak and wants you to do things exactly like he does.
Print the USA by Hess printing, full-color, 8.5"x 11".
Lots of screenshots throughout and inexpensive, all right.
This is a beginner book.
We're competing with Excel for dummies and others, so $14.95 for 200 full-color pages.
Check it out, we'll be doing some new podcasts here that support Don't Fear the Spreadsheet.
So you're gonna see some of these they're gonna be kind of easier topics but don't be surprised, I always say "the best Swordsman in the world should not fear the second best Swordsman".
"The best swordsman in the world should fear the person who has never handled a sword before" because we get all these bizarre questions things, that again you and I take for granted but are going to be off the wall.
You might just learn something, I know I did.
Hey, thanks for stopping by.
Watch for Don't Fear the Spreadsheets sprinkled in around the coming weeks...
This is the book that makes Excel for dummies looks like...
