Excel Advanced Report Development

Features

• Cover Type: Paperback with 504 pages
• Published by: Wiley; Book and CD-ROM edition July 29, 2005
• Written in: English
• ISBN 10 Number: 0764588117
• ISBN 13 Number: 978-0764588112
• Book Dimensions: 9.1 x 7.3 x 1.1 inches
• Weighs: 1.6 pounds

Product Description
If you're a SQL programmer or an experienced Excel user, here at last is the ultimate resource on developing reporting solutions with Excel. Focused on report development using OLTP databases, this book is packed with comprehensive information on both technical and strategic aspects. You'll thoroughly examine the main features of Excel's reporting technology-PivotTable reports, Spreadsheet reports, parameter queries, and web components. With notes, tips, warnings, and real-world examples in each chapter, you'll be able to put your knowledge to work immediately. This book includes:

• Single-source coverage of Excel's report development features
• Extensive and in-depth information on PivotTable and Spreadsheet report features, functions, and capabilities
• Thorough documentation of the Microsoft Query program included with Excel
• Comprehensive information on Excel's client-based OLAP cube tools for processing very large datasets from OLTP data sources
• Detailed information on creating and working with web-enabled Excel reports

Back Cover Copy
If you're a SQL programmer or an experienced Excel user, here at last is the ultimate resource on developing reporting solutions with Excel. Focused on report development using OLTP databases, this book is packed with comprehensive information on both technical and strategic aspects. You'll thoroughly examine the main features of Excel's reporting technology- PivotTable reports, Spreadsheet reports, parameter queries, and web components. With notes, tips, warnings, and real-world examples in each chapter, you'll be able to put your knowledge to work immediately.

• Single-source coverage of Excel's report development features
• Extensive and in-depth information on PivotTable® and Spreadsheet report features, functions, and capabilities
• Thorough documentation of the Microsoft® Query program included with Excel
• Comprehensive information on Excel's client-based OLAP cube tools for processing very large datasets from OLTP data sources
• Detailed information on creating and working with web-enabled Excel reports

Companion web site

Example files for all the exercises in the book are available for download at www.wiley.com/go/excelreporting, where you can also watch videos illustrating various lessons.

Reader Reviews
I would highly recommend this book to anyone who is interested in -- or who needs to learn about -- PivotTables, as well as Excel reporting in general. The coverage in this book is comprehensive, providing information on Excel report topics that just isn't available in most other books. Here are just ten items that I learned about from this book: 1. Prompting the user for parameters in Excel reports (Chapter 11): Parameters can be used with PivotTable lists or Spreadsheet reports, and they can also make the report run much faster and filter the returned dataset to a particular date range, division or product line. 2. Building Report Control Centers (Chapter 11): I learned how to build Spreadsheet report control centers that accept parameters and support a number of helpful functions, including: * Automatic report refreshes when a parameter value is changed * Drop-down lists of valid values that the user can choose to automatically refresh a report * Specific field formats to ensure that the data is entered correctly And, I learned how to do all this through simple, native graphical tools - there was no need for complex VBA programming! 3. Creating ultra-fast client-side OLAP cubes (Chapter 10): Given that I'm not actually data warehouse savvy, nor do I have the time to learn Analysis Services, Excel's client-side OLAP was perfect for me. I've been able to use it to organize data into dimension-level hierarchies for drilling-through data. And I was able to automatically rebuild OLAP cubes directly from Excel. The best part -- all 3 client-side OLAP cubes are covered in extensive detail in this book, unlike most other books on this topic which tend to just cover OLAP cubes in passing. 4. Hiding SQL queries (Chapter 6): I learned how to hide SQL queries from users in order to prevent them from viewing or modifying my report query. 5. Retrieving Data from OLTP databases (Chapter 2-9, 11, and 12): This book provides numerous examples of how data can be extracted from Access, SQL and Oracle databases, which has proved to be invaluable to me at work. And, this book also covers Text files (Chapter 3), OLAP cubes (Chapter 10), Web Sites (Chapter 11) and other data sources (Chapter 3). I even learned how to extract data from multiple databases - on the same or different servers (Chapter 6). 6. Fixing annoying problems with field names (Chapter 7): I learned how field headings from SQL queries can get corrupted - this book explained why this happens and, more importantly, how to fix it. 7. Publishing and using web-enabled reports (Chapter 12): This book dedicates an entire chapter to web-enabled reports. It shows how the best features of PivotTable and Spreadsheet reports are combined into PivotTable lists - and how to navigate through all the new functions, features and tools. 8. Restricting the number of rows returned (Chapter 7): This book showed me how to restrict the number of rows returned in a PivotTable and Spreadsheet reports. 9. Comprehensive coverage of PivotCharts (Chapter 9): This book dedicates an entire chapter to PivotCharts - and it focuses only on the important and relevant tools, techniques, features and functions of PivotCharts. 10. Complete SQL reference (Appendix B): I just have a basic knowledge of writing SQL. The appendix in this book was great! It really helped me fill in some of my gaps with basic SQL and I'm not writing more advanced SQL queries - thanks to this book! The author even helped me out with a few questions that I had about using text files (his email address is in the last chapter). I highly recommend that you buy this book if you have any interest in PivotTable or other types of Excel reporting books. It's truly the best on the subject!