Acknowledgments

I wish to thank Gene Zelazny of McKinsey & Company. Gene was generous with his time and feedback. He indirectly taught me a lot about charting over a decade ago, when I did a six-month stint on a McKinsey project team. Kathy Villella and Tom Bunzel also provided advice on presentations. Mala Singh of XLSoft Consulting vetted the chapter on using VBA to create charts.

Mike Alexander, my coauthor on the Pivot Table Data Crunching books, helped outline the table of contents for this book and provided many ideas for Chapter 7. You can catch Mike and me twice a year teaming up for the three-day Power Analyst Boot Camp.

I enjoy the visual delight of every Edward Tufte book. I apologize in advance to E.T. for documenting all the chartjunk that Microsoft lets us add to Excel charts.

Dick DeBartolo is the Daily GizWiz and has been writing for Mad magazine for more than 40 years, since he was 15. The pages of Mad were not where I expected to find inspiration for a charting book, but why not? Thanks to John Marcinko, my son’s friend who pointed me, in a random conversation, to the Mad charts. Thanks to Bob D’Amico for illustrating the charts à la Mad. The pie chart in Chapter 4 is a Dick DeBartolo original, created especially for this book. Many thanks to Dick for being a contributor.

I was visiting Keith Bradbury’s office in Toronto. Keith makes the completely awesome PDF-to-Excel utility at InvestInTech.com. Between parking the car and Keith’s office, I saw the most amazing store, managed by David Michaelides. SWIPE is a bookstore dedicated to art and design. This is a beautiful store to browse, and if you go in and reveal that you work in Excel all day, they will sympathetically be very nice to you. In a clash of worlds, David has the original 1984 Mac way up above his cash register because it was the start of desktop publishing. I pointed out that the Mac was where Excel 1.0 got its start in 1985, so we had a common thread in our respective backgrounds. Stop by 477 Richmond Street West (two blocks west of Spadina) to take a look the next time you are in Toronto.

Thanks to Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston for inventing the computer spreadsheet. Thanks to Mitch Kapor for Lotus 1-2-3. Thanks to David Gainer at Microsoft for guiding the Excel team through Excel 2007 and Excel 2010.

At MrExcel.com, thanks to Barb Jelen, Wei Jiang, Tracy Syrstad, Schar Oswald, and Scott Pierson. Thanks also to Josh and Zeke Jelen, who have been picking up hours after school learning how to edit and produce the MrExcel podcast.

The Microsoft MVPs for Excel are always generous with their time and ideas. Over the years, I’ve learned many cool charting tricks from websites maintained by John Peltier, Andy Pope, and Charley Kyd. Turn to the appendix for links to their respective websites. MVP Bob Umlas (the smartest Excel guy I know) served as a great technical editor. I still smile when I recall Bob pointing out that “9. Repeat step 9 for High, Low, and Close lines.” was, in itself, a circular reference.

At Pearson, Loretta Yates is an awesome acquisitions editor. Keith Cline and Sondra Scott made this book better with their editing.

Finally, thanks to Josh Jelen, Zeke Jelen, and Mary Ellen Jelen. Writing five books simultaneously means way too many nights writing.