Acknowledgments

Mike Alexander is one of the two funniest guys doing live Excel seminars. I appreciate him as a coauthor on all three editions of this book, which has earned the #1 spot on the Amazon Computer Book bestseller list (for 54 minutes one day in January). Rob Collie from Microsoft had the unlikely happenstance of transferring to Cleveland. Our regular lunches drove most of my understanding for the PowerPivot chapter. Thanks to Pito Salas, who invented the pivot table concept back at Lotus in the 1980s. Thanks to Allan Foltang and all the pivot table team at Microsoft for continuing to improve pivot tables. Donald Farmer, Amir Netz, and the rest of the PowerPivot team should win a Nobel prize in science for bringing the PowerPivot add-in to 500 million people using Excel. At MrExcel.com, thanks to Schar Oswald, Tracy Syrstad, Wei Jiang, Scott Pearson, and an entire community of people passionate about Excel. Not to be forgotten: My sons Josh and Zeke are picking up a few hours after school each day keeping the podcasts edited and posted. Thanks to VoG and Richard Schollar for teaching me about the UNION function in Excel VBA. You saved the VBA chapter for me. Loretta Yates at Pearson Education is the best editor ever. Finally, thanks to my wife Mary Ellen for her support during the writing process.

—Bill Jelen

Thanks to Bill Jelen for deciding to coauthor this book with me many editions ago. His knowledge of Excel still blows me away to this day. My deepest thanks to Loretta Yates, for all the hours of work put into bringing this book to life. Thanks also to Bob Umlas for making sure Bill and I don’t embarrass ourselves with technical errors. Bob suggested numerous improvements to the examples and text in this book. Finally, a special thank you goes to the wife and kids for putting up with all the time spent locked away on this project.

—Mike Alexander