Mark,
You ask a really thorny question. Fair warning: I'm about to go off on a
rant here.
We all have a preferred learning method. Some, Harald f'rinstance, prefer
thick books. Thanks be. I've written eleven such doorstops and they've been
reasonably well-received. And I've never, ever read a book on Excel. God
knows I've tried. I own a couple of them and I've furiously studied some of
their chapters: the original Microsoft Step by Step book on VBA, and Eric
Wells' book on Excel 95 Solutions -- particularly the chapters on DAO, which
are now obsolete. But my preferred method of learning is to respond to a
client's request and when I fail to come up with a solution, search the
newsgroups, and as a final resort the Knowledge Base. (I've been beat up
pretty good a couple of times for having posted a stupid question, which
convinced me that there really _are_ stupid questions.) Sometimes even that
fails -- I recently could not find a working solution to a problem with
Excel 97 .CurrentPage.
Along with many other old-timers, I originally learned Excel and the arcane
Excel 4.0 macro language, and eventually VBA, from the erstwhile CompuServe
forum, similar to this one, albeit more dignified. I can recall sitting at
my tube at 6:00 a.m. reading answers provided by Rech, Umlas, LaTour,
Greenblatt, Baarns, Lacher, Bovey (and many others whose names will
doubtless come to me the next time 3:00 a.m. rolls around and I'll bury my
head under the pillow for having left them out), sipping coffee and
thinking, "Cool. Does that _really_ work?" Turned out it did, and that's
always been my own preferred learning method.
But my accountant, a _really_ smart person, doesn't know the meaning of
"newsgroup" and has taken five classroom courses on Excel and as of last
year still didn't know about custom lists (Jan, Feb, Mar, etc.) and
AutoFill. Part of the problem is that so many companies that purport to
teach Excel have sunk costs in spiral bound books that were written for
Excel 4.0 or 95, and they still haven't gotten them out of inventory. The
remainder of my accountant's problem concerns not being suited for
unidirectional classroom learning, but for some kind of interactive
situation.
And I have an in-law (I like him anyway) who has made a bundle in commercial
real estate but who couldn't enter a SUM function to save his life until he
got a friend -- not me, he lives in Missouri -- to sit down with him in
front of a keyboard/monitor and hold his hand while showing him how to enter
formulas and functions. Obviously, this is the most labor-intensive and
expensive manner of learning, and it's a good thing that Steve could afford
it because he wasn't going to learn any other way.
The fact that the Video Professor still has the resources to advertise on
television suggests that some people can be convinced to regard
videotape/DVD as a good learning medium -- or, less cynically, that
videotape fits some people's learning style.
In other words, whatever trips your trigger, and you're the only one who can
answer that question for certain for yourself. The previous replies in this
thread offer very plausible options. I'm working on a new one; keep a good
thought, OK?
C^2
Conrad Carlberg
Excel Sales Forecasting for Dummies, Wiley, 2005
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