Excel vX Mac vs 200x Win?

[Matthew]

I'm looking for a good, advanced/comprehensive book on Excel that goes into
plenty of detail about various analysis, database etc functions in Excel. I
have the Office Mac vX Inside Out book, but I really need something with a
lot more Excel coverage.

Obviously, there is a lot more choice in books for Excel for Windows. Had a
brief look at Excel 2003 Inside Out at a bookshop which looks more like what
I need.

Anyway, question in hand: not having much experience with Excel for Windows,
what's the closest version to vX on the Mac? Would an Excel 2003 book have
lots of irrelevant stuff? Would 2002 be a better match?

And finally, anyone recommend any books in particular?

MTIA, Matthew

 

[J.E. McGimpsey]

I'm looking for a good, advanced/comprehensive book on Excel that goes into
plenty of detail about various analysis, database etc functions in Excel. I
have the Office Mac vX Inside Out book, but I really need something with a
lot more Excel coverage.

Obviously, there is a lot more choice in books for Excel for Windows. Had a
brief look at Excel 2003 Inside Out at a bookshop which looks more like what
I need.

Anyway, question in hand: not having much experience with Excel for Windows,
what's the closest version to vX on the Mac? Would an Excel 2003 book have
lots of irrelevant stuff? Would 2002 be a better match?

And finally, anyone recommend any books in particular?

As far as functions go, WinXL97/00/02/03 and MacXL98/01/v.X are
almost identical, so a book for one would work for all.

Very little has changed in the functions available in XL since XL97.
The vast majority of the changes have been in the user interface,
bells and whistles, etc. Which doesn't mean that upgrading isn't
worthwhile - I'm more productive in v.X than I was in 98 because of
some of the features, but my workbooks work just as well in 98 as
they do in WinXL03.

My favorite book for worksheet functions is John Walkenbach's "Excel
200x Formulas". 2002 is a fairly minor update to 2000.

If you're interested in charting, John's "Excel Charts" is also very
good.

Both of the above are written for WinXL, but 90% is directly
applicable to MacXL as well.

As far as which version is "closest" - it depends. VBA in all
versions of MacXL is stuck back at version 5.00, the same version as
WinXL97. XL2001 has a feature or two (notably the List Manager) that
was just introduced to WinXL with XL03. No WinXL version has the
Formatting Palette. XLv.X is mostly a port of XL2001 to OS X, so
just as a rough estimation, I'd say XLv.X is most similar to XL2000.