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 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. Each chapter advances your data analysis and modeling expertise using real-world examples and learn-by-doing exercises. You also get all the book’s problem-and-solution files on CD—for all the practice you need to solve complex problems and work smarter with Excel.

Learn how to solve real business problems with Excel!

• Create best, worst, and most-likely scenarios for sales
• Calculate how long it would take to recoup a project’s startup costs
• Plan personal finances, such as computing loan terms or saving for retirement
• Estimate a product’s demand curve
• Simulate stock performance over a year
• Determine which product mix will yield the greatest profits
• Interpret the effects of price and advertising on sales
• Assign a dollar value to customer loyalty
• Manage inventory and order quantities with precision
• Create customer service queues with short wait times
• Estimate the probabilities of equipment failure
• Model business uncertainties
• Get new perspectives on data with PivotTable dynamic views
• Help predict quarterly revenue, outcomes of sporting events, presidential elections, and more!

On the CD:

• Practice files for all the book’s exercises
• Solutions for problem sets
• Fully searchable eBook

A Note Regarding the CD or DVD

The print version of this book ships with a CD or DVD. For those customers purchasing one of the digital formats in which this book is available, we are pleased to offer the CD/DVD content as a free download via O'Reilly Media's Digital Distribution services. To download this content, please visit O'Reilly's web site, search for the title of this book to find its catalog page, and click on the link below the cover image (Examples, Companion Content, or Practice Files). Note that while we provide as much of the media content as we are able via free download, we are sometimes limited by licensing restrictions. Please direct any questions or concerns to booktech@oreilly.com.