Master the techniques that business analysts at leading companies use to transform data into bottom-line results. For more than a decade, well-known consultant and business professor Wayne Winston has been teaching corporate clients and MBA students the most effective ways to use Microsoft Office Excel for data analysis, modeling, and decision making. Now this award-winning educator shares the best of his classroom experience in this practical, business-focused guide—updated and expanded for Excel 2007. Each chapter advances your data analysis and modeling expertise using real-world examples and learn-by-doing exercises. You’ll learn how to create best, worst, and most-likely scenarios for sales, estimate a product’s demand curve, forecast using trend and seasonality, and determine which product mix will yield the greatest profit. You’ll even discover how to interpret the effects of price and advertising on sales and how to assign a dollar value to customer loyalty.

Amazon.com® Reader Reviews (Ranked by Helpfulness)

Average Amazon.com® Rating:  Based on 10 Ratings

Not as useful as I was hoping. Could be more in-depth with OR examples. - 2009-08-02
Reviewer Rating:
Having studied Wayne Wilson's OR materials, I was hoping this book would be a bit more technical and in-depth. Basically, I was hoping for a "how to do OR type problems with Excel". This book didn't quite meet those expectations.

For example, the forecasting portion talks only about Winter's method, which is great, but often that is too much for a simple forecast. And the LP approach doesn't really talk about Linear Programming...it only casually mentions the "Simplex" algorithm, and nothing about sensitivity tables.

So Dr. Wilson, if you're reading -- could you write a real OR book that uses the Excel 2007 tools? for real OR people?

Book is great, online course is better! - 2009-05-28
Reviewer Rating:
Must read for anyone who models business problems or does statistical analysis.

If you haven't been to one of his seminars, you should check out his online course, Spreadsheet Modeling, developed by Harvard Business School (http://hbdm.harvardbusiness.org/courses).

The course shows you how to create spreadsheet models to analyze both simple and complex problems. It's practical and painless. Includes lots of great videos and is very interactive.

Book is excellent! - 2009-04-07
Reviewer Rating:
I like the approach taken in the book of the author being asked questions and his answers are the learning tool. Real World learning.

Just what I needed. - 2009-11-16
Reviewer Rating:
This book is an excellent, comprehensive explanation of how to leverage the analysis tools in Excel 2007. The case study approach for the general tool topics helps you connect the type of analysis you may need with the appropriate tool set. The table of contents addresses all the tools and the first page of each chapter lists different cases where the tool can be applied, so it's quick to figure out the best approach to finding what you need. The accompanying CD with example files is extremely helpful. It allows you to examine the raw data and how the different tools are applied. I would recommend this book as both an effective primer for someone not so familiar with Excel's more powerful tools and a nice reference for those who simply need to look up specific formulas or approaches. It covers a wide range of situations where Excel's analytical tools can help.

Just what I needed - 2009-09-12
Reviewer Rating:
I loved the fact that the software attached to this book came with it and works well.

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