Calling all Excel junkies

Snippylynn

I know there are a few of you out there. I am looking for a reference book to help me to use Excel to the best of its ability in statistical analysis of marketing information. This will generally be in regard to ROI for material created, webpage hits and usage, enews click rates, etc. I have a lot of data that is 1) spread out among multiple tools (google analytics, cognos and an internally created 'tool') that i want to bring together, 2) much of the data is useless because of my inability to create correlations and do a thorough analysis due to 1, 3) Much of what I create now is incredibly manual and time consuming and I KNOW there are shortcuts. 

And finally, I want to make it look really good. 

Any thoughts? I have been looking at: 

http://www.amazon.com/Microsoft-Excel-2010-Analysis-Business/dp/0735643369/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1341923461&sr=1-3&keywords=statistical+analysis+with+excel

http://www.amazon.com/Statistical-Analysis-Dummies-Joseph-Schmuller/dp/0470454067/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1341923461&sr=1-1&keywords=statistical+analysis+with+excel

http://www.amazon.com/Excel-Dashboards-Reports-Spreadsheets-Bookshelf/dp/0470620129/ref=sr_1_6?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1341923372&sr=1-6&keywords=business+statistics+in+excel

http://www.amazon.com/Statistical-Analysis-Microsoft-Excel-2010/dp/0789747200/ref=pd_sim_b_2

Help me please?

ski2play

I can not recommend any of the above books.  I am a self taught excel junkie.  I find the help feature within excel to be an excellent reference.  I also find that when working with anyone else on excel, you can learn so much be observation since there are so many ways to get to the same end result.

Good Luck!

Snippylynn

In Response to <a href="http://forums.theknot.com/Sites/theknot/Pages/Main.aspx/wedding-boards_etiquette_calling-all-excel-junkies?plckFindPostKey=Cat:Wedding%20BoardsForum:9Discussion:777d17f3-5256-46fe-9bdf-c4031ec3cb07Post:c6fd6cdb-8148-4b42-ad83-f3e4c512c4ad">Re: Calling all Excel junkies</a>:
[QUOTE]I can usually find a tutorial online that meets my needs, but I never analyze data in excel, aside from making a quick graph. A lot of the stats functions in excel are programmed wrong, as in they contain computational errors. Unless you are just looking at averages, I would skip excel for stats altogether. Minitab is a pretty basic and straightforward stats program. It is the one my uni used for intro stats classes, but I am not sure if it expensive.
Posted by Liatris2010[/QUOTE]
Lia, my company is absurdley bent on creating their own tools, so i won't even bring it up to them. They think having homegrown everything is the way to foster an entreprenurial spirit and sometimes it works but most of the time it doesn't. lol<div>
</div><div>ETA: Stage, the internally created tool does import into excel, but cognos doesn't. I think Google analytics does, but I haven't figure out how on that either.</div>

Snippylynn

Excellent. Thanks Stage!