This book is written for the students and practitioners who are looking for a single introductory Excel-based resource that covers three essential business and analytical skills—Data Analysis, Business Modeling, and Simulation of Complex Problems. The focus of the book is clearly on analysis of problems for decision making, yet detailed explanations regarding how to use Excel tools are provided. After many years of teaching and consulting, it is abundantly clear to me that for most students, a good example is worth its weight in gold. This book contains many excellent examples in each chapter, some simple and others more complex, and there is an abundance of exhibits to guide the student through the maze of steps necessary for each analysis. The content is quite diverse: • data presentation — the Feng Shui of spreadsheets, effective communication and collaboration • data preparation — import, scrub, manipulate data • data analysis — statistical methods: descriptive, inferential, and predictive, Design of Experiments • modeling — deterministic, probabilistic, What-if, Scenarios • simulation — quantifying uncertainty, Monte Carlo Simulation • optimization — constrained, Linear Programming, non-linear models, Goal Seek • Couple these features with detailed discussions of how to realistically organize and extract insight from complex problems, and I believe you have a unique educational combination in one book.
