I had to make a few educated guesses about you, my audience, when I started writing this book. Perhaps you just use Excel for personal reasons, tracking your household budget, doing some financial planning, or recording your times for weekend bike races. Maybe you run a small, home-based business, or you’re an employee of a corporation where you use Excel to analyze and present sales or production data. Taking all these possibilities into account, I assumed you’d need to know how to create and work with Excel workbooks and worksheets, summarize your data in a variety of ways, format your documents so that they’re easy to read, and then print the results or share them over the Web or distribute your data both ways.

Another assumption I made is that—initially, anyway—you’d use Excel 2007 just as it came, meaning that you’d be working with the standard user interface. I like the new user interface, so that’s what I’ve described in the procedures and graphics throughout this book.