Struggling with Microsoft Excel?
Get “Excel Power Shortcuts”


The book was written with the goal of accelerating your Excel skill set through the roof. We cut through the bull*, instead teaching you only the most important, time-saving shortcuts, features and functions of Excel.


* "bull" = the features and functions that the average user - even power users - may never even need or use. You see, most Excel tutorial books are in the business of selling paper (one official Microsoft Excel tutorial I have is over 1,000 pages long - c'mon, who has the time to read that?!). That's why they bring you in overwhelming detail through every Excel feature under the sun - most of which you will never, ever need to use.

Just enter your name and e-mail address below to get a FREE, printable Cheat Sheet of over 40 of the most useful function keys and keyboard shortcuts. When you do, you will be also automatically signed up to receive Jed's eNewsletter packed full of tips and tricks for managing your database, using Excel, and lots more.

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About the Excel Power Shortcuts eBook
This eBook
  • Has something for everyone: from the complete beginner to the self-styled "Excel expert" who already knows everything there is to know
  • Will save you time by showing you how to navigate around your Excel spreadsheets more quickly than you ever thought possible
  • Reduce errors that can creep into your work by showing you simple, fail-safe methods for checking errors
  • Is available to you right now as a downloadable PDF file
  • Will help you avoid embarrassing situations whereby you "forget" how to do simple functions while your boss is waiting patiently nearby
  • Look like an Excel stud in front of your peers, colleagues and the world in general
  • Contains tips & techniques, 95% of which can be used in conjunction with the two most recent versions of Microsoft Excel: Excel 2003 and Excel 2007 (Excel 12)
  • 76 clearly-written, no-nonsense pages in all - including lots of screenshots to help you understand everything that is going on!
  • Costs only $18.77! You stand to make that back in gained productivity after just an hour or two of putting its secrets into practice.
This eBook is NOT:
  • This is NOT: your typical Excel tutorial or guide - it was designed specifically for the casual business user and for the expert who wants to pick up those few extra power tips
  • This eBook is NOT: written only for people who are already "good" at Excel or who already consider themselves computer geeks or nerds. (While this eBook assumes you have a very basic working knowledge of Excel, it even includes a short section for absolute beginners to get you started right away). This eBook offers tips to Excel beginners, intermediate users, and advanced users alike.
  • It's NOT: a 1,000-page monster containing every facet of Excel - rather, it boils down the important stuff for you and ignores the stuff that most users will never need to know
  • This is definitely NOT: written in a boring, academic style like most tutorial books - it's easy to read, presenting how-to's and tips in short, digestible chunks

About the Author:

Jed Jones, Ph.D., is the founder of Untangle-Your-Thoughts.com and is the president of interactive marketing firm, JCJ Interactive, Inc.. He has been working with database and spreadsheet software applications in business situations for well over a decade. Jed has logged an estimated 10,000+ hours using Microsoft Excel. He has applied his Excel and database skills to solving tough analytical problems, scrubbing customer databases, and supporting database software applications for numerous Fortune 50, midsize and small companies, including three years in Enterprise Products Marketing for Dell, Inc. in Japan. Jed is fluent in written and spoken Japanese and has a working knowledge of six other languages.

Who “Excel Power Shortcuts” is Designed for
See if any of the following descriptions fits you:

  • You already have a very basic understanding of Excel. But, due to a job or career change, you are just now having to learn how to become more effective using Excel for the first time but don’t want to wade through enormous manuals just to get started. You want immediate and direct access to “the good stuff” (whatever that may be) and you want it now.
  • You know someone who can do stuff that you just never thought possible with Excel, and you have “Excel envy” (to paraphrase Dr. Freud). You want to catch up or even surpass that know-it-all. Who does she think she is, anyway?
  • You have experienced on more than one occasion your boss or a colleague waiting patiently nearby while you lumbered through what should have been a relatively simple Excel operation – causing delays for everyone in the room while they awaited the results of your much-anticipated work.
  • You have at least once in the past turned in an Excel file that later turned out to be fraught with errors, thereby causing yourself embarrassment and even costing your company money. Ouch!
  • You are already a proficient, experienced Excel user but have never had the time to read one of those huge, 1,000-page “become-Excel-master-of-the-universe” manuals. Still, you want to pick up a few additional tips which could save you time or allow you to do even more cool stuff than you can now and that will increase your productivity by 200% or more.
How this eBook can Help You
Once you have mastered the Excel basics and some of the more advanced tips and tricks I share with you herein, you will immediately want to dig in and learn how to start using this software to its fullest. After reading this eBook, you will experience the following features and benefits:

  • Increased Speed & Efficiency: navigate and move data around more quickly
  • More Power: get more (business insight, knowledge, predictive power, descriptive power) from your existing data
  • Fewer Errors: get more accurate results
Why Excel Rocks
Think of all of the things you can do with Microsoft Excel. For example, you can:

  • Store over 17 billion individual pieces of information (that’s how many cells one Excel 2007 worksheet has!), such as formulas, numbers and text
  • Create, track and balance your household budget – no matter how extensive or complex
  • Keep track of your company’s past sales and project future sales as far into the future as you like
  • Perform complicated statistical functions like correlations, standard deviations, and variances
  • Solve geometric, calculus, and algebraic calculations
  • Generate colorful graphs such as pie charts, line graphs and histograms (bar charts)
  • Create tables to organize your data and report to others on your company’s progress
  • Clean up, organize and prepare your data for use in other applications such as database programs, statistical software, and tons of others
Excel is an impressively powerful piece of software. Still, because it ships with most PC computers, and given that most people have at least a basic familiarity with Excel, it can be easy to underestimate just what it can do for you – if you know how to use it. In fact, most people who use Excel barely scratch the surface in terms of understanding how to really use Excel to its fullest. The good news is: you don’t need to learn everything in order to do so. In fact, just learning the tips and tricks shared herein can propel you to much higher levels of speed and efficiency.
Why Most People Underestimate Excel
Most computer users take the power of Excel for granted. Here I’ll venture forth with my view as to the main reasons for this:

  • It doesn’t ship pre-configured to solve a particular kind of problem: unlike applications designed for more specific purposes (e.g., accounting software, genealogy software, architectural software, etc.), Excel doesn’t ship in a paint-by-numbers format, with the outlines and doodles already in place for you. Rather, it’s like a wide-open, expansive blank canvas onto which you can paint your own data picture with surprisingly few constraints.
  • Lack of awareness about what it can do: people just aren’t aware of some of Excel’s most powerful features and functions – thus limiting themselves due to their lack of knowledge.
  • Frustration around how to “make one’s way around” in Excel: imagine trying to drive a car for the first time without ever having observed someone else drive. After a few hours of experimentation, you would probably eventually get the hang of it (“hmmmmmm: that pedal down there on the right seems to make the car move forward and . . . . the next pedal to the left makes it stop, and the wheel near my chest allows me to turn left or right. . . “) – but you would likely forever remain far from mastery. In fact, without the proper driving and operational lessons, you might never figure out how to use the radio, learn how to pop the trunk, or ever find out that the car had built-in GPS. Most people are the same way with Excel: they learn just enough to get a few things done, but they seldom take the time to learn just a handful of tips and tricks that can make their work so much more efficient and error-free.
"Excel Power Shortcuts" Gets Right to the Good Stuff
This eBook is not designed to help you learn everything there is to know about Excel. In fact, I would not recommend that to anyone. There is a reason that reference libraries, dictionaries, encyclopedias and online wikis exist: to allow people to look up the details when needed.

Much like the scene selection feature in a DVD player, this eBook allows you to skip the parts of Excel that are less often used and instead get right to the good stuff. In fact, this eBook overlooks about 90-95% of the features and functions available in Excel – on purpose.

Paradoxically, once you finish reading and then put into practice the tips shared in this eBook, you will arguably be more proficient than many Excel users who have wasted untold hours of their lives reading those 1,000-page Excel manuals cover to cover. How could this be true? It’s because this eBook focuses only on the most useful and helpful features and functions of Excel, regardless of one’s level of Excel proficiency.

Once you learn these tips and tricks, you will be much better poised to go back and start learning the many other Excel features that you can use for more specific tasks or that pertain to your line of work. However, learning these on your own will be 10 times easier once you have learned the tips and tricks I share herein.
How I Chose Only the Most Essential Tips & Tricks
How can you be sure that I chose only the good stuff for this eBook? Simple: by relying on my own extensive Excel knowledge and experience that is rooted in over 10 years of using Excel for business, scientific and personal applications. I have performed both Excel and Access database analyses as an employee of Fortune 50 companies, small and midsize businesses in the U.S., Japan and Latin America. I have also completed complex Excel projects for scores of my own clients, as well as in support of my own companies’ financial and strategic initiatives. Meanwhile, from a research and academic perspective, I have depended upon Excel to get me through the hard number-crunching work required to earn my M.B.A. in marketing, and I used it to record and analyze research data while completing my Ph.D. dissertation. I have used Excel in conjunction with complex computer analyses involving predictive modeling and statistical applications such as neural networks, and I have interfaced my Excel-based analyses extensively with database and mapping applications. In all, I estimate that I have logged over 10,000 hours in Excel.

Over time and across all of these varied use-cases and application scenarios, I have come to observe which features and functions of Excel tend to get used most frequently (and are in fact the most useful on a day in, day out basis). But, to make sure I wasn’t missing anything amazing that I’d somehow overlooked over the years (and, admittedly, there were a few of those), I scoured every Excel tips, tricks, hacks and how-to manual I could get my hands on before writing this eBook. Based upon my own experience – and supplement by my research - I wrote down everything I thought that the average businessperson, householder and scientist using Excel would need to know to become a super-proficient user of Excel.
What’s Unique about this eBook?
During my research phase for this eBook, I observed that there were two main types of Excel books available in the marketplace:

  • There are some great “tips and tricks” and “hacks” books out there, but beyond about page 22 they tend to get into areas that are fairly complicated or that take a long time to learn and implement. For example, many of the tips shared therein employ lots of Visual Basic (VBA) and other complex computing commands that most people just don’t want to take the time learn, no matter how helpful they could be. Many of the other tips they offer are simply very long and complicated to learn and use –becoming more trouble than they’re worth for the average, non-computer geek user.
  • On the other hand, there are available in the marketplace some very comprehensive guides and how-to manuals that are 500 to 1,000 pages long. For example, many of the books published or authorized by Microsoft fall into this category. These are actually great books to have around as reference manuals because they literally contain everything you would ever want to know about Excel. But, that’s also their shortcoming: these books do not focus in on those 5%-10% of features and functions that are most helpful and that you’ll really find yourself using regularly. Rather, they just “dump” all of that knowledge out and expect most or all of it to stick. Instead, what usually happens with most people is that almost none of it sticks. Or, worse, the books just lay there on the shelf, gathering dust.
One other characteristic that all of the Excel books that I reviewed lack but that you can find in “Excel Power Shortcuts” (and this is probably the most important): “Excel Power Shortcuts” shares with you not only the software’s top features and functions, but also methods and techniques that represent best practices I have found or devised for how to organize your data and conduct your analyses.