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Updated my Excel Basics book for Excel 2019

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Earlier this month I released a revised version of Excel Basics In 30 Minutes. This is the third edition of the book. The first, published in 2012 under a slightly different title, showed users how to use Excel 2010 (for PCs) and Excel for Mac (which was then a very different software product). The second edition, published in 2015, covered Excel 2013. A few years later, I updated the second edition for Excel 2016 as well as Excel Online and the mobile apps for iOS and Android.

Now it’s 2020. Besides refreshing the book for the latest desktop version of Excel (Excel 2019, part of the Office 365 suite), I also made a few other changes that were a bit more significant.

Streamlined Excel examples

I built the first edition around the story of three colleagues in a sales department, and how Excel could be used to track their sales and earnings. Through these examples, I introduced basic Excel concepts, including:

  • Functions
  • Formulas
  • Formatting data
  • AutoFill
  • Charts
  • Filtering and sorting data
  • Static cell references

The problem: the chapter on projecting sales was simply too complicated, and describing how to hide and manipulate data for different people was distracting. In the new edition of my Excel book, I only project the earnings of one of the colleagues in that chapter and simplify the step-by-step instructions and screenshots:

Excel Basics in 30 Minutes sorting exampleExplaining the Excel mobile apps

Before starting the new edition of Excel Basics In 30 Minutes, I hoped to be able to expand the sections on the Excel mobile apps for iOS and Android.

I quickly discovered that the apps, while very full-featured, are really hard to use with a touch-screen interface. This is particularly true for phones, where a lot of taps are required just to change a single cell.

The reason, of course, is the fact that most Excel spreadsheets are complicated, with lots of cells and columns and buttons and commands. It was designed for the keyboard and mouse, often requires accessing files that aren’t stored or exported locally (such as .csv files and charts). Shoehorning the user interface and features into a touch-screen device is really hard to do.

Excel iOS autosum example

So, while the book does explain how to use certain Excel features on small-screen devices (the example above shows Excel AutoSum for iOS), for many of the examples I advise people to use the desktop versions of Excel 2019 for Windows and macOS.

Excel alternatives: Google Sheets and Excel Online

One very popular feature of Excel Basics In 30 Minutes since the first edition is the inclusion of instructions for Google Sheets, a free Excel alternative. Readers and reviewers constantly remark about how helpful it is to be able to use Sheets with the book, either because they can’t afford Excel or their office or school uses G Suite (the Google equivalent of Microsoft Office). I’ve updated the latest edition of the book for Google Sheets, which hasn’t changed much since the last book update.

Excel Online has changed quite a bit. In 2018, when the last update to the second edition of the book was published, Excel Online was pretty bare-boned — almost a grudging freebie made available to counter the threat of Google Sheets. As of 2020, the Excel Online interface has been really improved, and there are a bunch of new features that weren’t there before, including filtering.

If you’re interested in learning more about the third edition of the book, check out the official website, excel.in30minutes.com:

Excel Basics book website screenshot 02102020

Google support falls short when it comes to Google Blogger custom domains

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Google blogger custom domains support
Earlier this year I published a short “how-to” blog post titled How to renew a Blogger custom domain through Google Apps. I’m mentioning it here, not only because it’s a useful resource for anyone who purchased a custom domain through Google’s Blogger service in recent years, but also because it points to a problem with Google support.

Google has a myriad of wonderful products, ranging from basic search to advanced tools such as Google Earth. I use many of them every day, and even wrote a Google Docs for Dummies substitute. But the fact that I even had to write such a title indicates that Google’s interface design and online support resources don’t work well for everyone.

For instance, Google Blogger has thousands of support articles and forum posts scattered all over the net, as well as related resources from Google Apps and other tools that interface with Blogger. But when it came time for me to renew a Blogger custom domain that I had purchased through Google in 2012, these help resources were useless. I simply couldn’t find what I was looking for to help me access the control panel for my domain.

Contacting a live Google employee for Blogger custom domains support

As described in my blog post, I eventually found a contact form and asked how I could proceed with the renewal. To my surprise (Google has a reputation for limiting contact with actual Google employees) someone responded within 12 hours, with an answer for my problem. It worked! I posted the solution on my blog, so other people in the same predicament could help themselves.

Some people might say that the fact I got a response from a real Google employee so quickly is a sign that Google support is actually quite strong. But I suspect the only reason I got any support was because I was A) using a paid feature (custom domain purchase) and B) it was tied to Google Apps, a premium service aimed at small businesses. The New York Times summed up Google’s attitude toward human support in this 2012 article:

Google, which at 14 years old is a relative ancient in Silicon Valley, is one of the few companies that publishes phone numbers on its Web site. Its phone system sends callers back to the Web no less than 11 times. Its lengthy messages contain basic Internet education in a tone that might be used with an aging relative, explaining, slowly and gently, “There’s nothing Google can do to remove information from Web sites.”

Note: Google has a new process for registering custom domains. See How to use Google Domains to register a custom domain on Blogger