There is a list of Excel books on my Contextures website, and it hasn’t been updated recently. Today, I checked Amazon, to see what new and exciting Excel books had been released, so I could start adding them to the list.
New Excel Book
There’s a book – Excel 2010 Made Simple, by Abbott Katz — with a release date of May 31, 2011, from Apress, the publisher of my pivot table books.
Amazon lists the book as “not yet released”, but they show the cover, which you can see below.
Excel Charts Chapter
One of the chapters is on Excel charts, and the book blurb promises that you’ll learn “How to create colorful, meaningful charts”.
I hope the cover chart was selected by someone in the Apress marketing department, and not the author!
Missing Books
I’ll be updating the list of Excel books over the next few weeks, so if you know of any recent books that are missing from the list, please let me know, so I can include them. Thanks!
Make a Simple Pie Chart
And if you do need to make a pie chart in Excel, for a business report, or for the cover of your next book, keep it simple!
This video shows how to make a basic pie chart in Excel, then add formatting, labels, and other features. Use your Excel charting powers for good, not evil!
Excel Chart Links
If you want to learn more about Excel chart, but not the 3-D rainbow-coloured kind, check out the tutorials at the following links:
Box Plot Chart (Box and Whisker)
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Ouch. Doesn’t Apres give the author the chance to review the book cover? Our author team certainly influenced the cover art on the RibbonX book. While I’m not going to say it was brilliant, it ended up miles better than the first pitch.
Personally, this cover art would stop me from buying the book as it obviously doesn’t represent good charting displays…
You can’t even make a chart like that in Excel, fortunately.
No, the chart in te cover would be flashy but for someone who has experience is useless.
I would no buy it, if no know you as writter.
Head*desk
Ken,
Visually appealing covers and catchy titles get interested buyers to pick up books and look inside. The conversion rate jumps exponentially. While I think authors should exert some influence on the cover, the ultimate goal is to sell, right? Authors should focus on what’s between the covers, not what’s on them. That should be left to the marketing experts.
And while Excel experts like you or data visualazation gurus probably are not likely to buy the book based on this cover, are Excel experts and data visualatization gurus really the target audience? My guess is that the target audience is more beginner/intermediate users of Excel. A 3D shadowed pie chart may not be very useful (or even possible per JP), but visually, it looks cool and it may entice a potential buyer to investigate further. Mission accomplished.
Jason –
While it is true that sizzle sells the steak, there are two problems with this cover. First, the unknowing buyer picks up the book, then is upset that he can’t find how to make the chart on the cover. Second, someone with a little knowledge of effective data visualization techniques who wants to learn about Excel will take one look and pass this one by. I guess if the former outweigh the latter, that’s fine, because the buyer who is upset about not learning how to make atrocious charts has already paid for the book.