When we talk about learning Excel, we almost always think of videos and written tutorials.
While these are great ways to learn Excel, you can also consider using Excel books to level up your Excel learning.
And if you think that books are boring and hard to understand, I must tell you that there are some great Excel books out there that have been continually improved over the years.
These are now a lot easier to go through (even Kindle books are available), and often do a much better job of giving you a structured learning experience.
So, if you are thinking of learning Excel, you must consider using Excel books as well.
And to help with that, I am listing the best Excel books that are available right now and have benefited thousands of people over the globe.
Best Excel Books To Become an Excel Pro
While there are hundreds of Excel books out there (with each claiming to be the best Excel resource ever), it could be quite hard to know which books to go for.
Here is a list of 10 amazing Excel books that have been thoughtfully written (and reviewed multiple times over the years).
I have personally read each of the books and learned a lot from them. You don’t need to get all these books. Just choose one (or a couple) about the topics you wish to learn about and get these first.
Microsoft Excel 365 Bible (1st Edition)
This Excel bible (available for Microsoft 365 as well as Excel 2019) is written by John Walkenbach and is one of the best Excel books you can refer to. It’s quite in-depth and covers a lot of useful topics.
And it’s quite detailed (1152 pages of Excel awesomeness)
Best Takeaways
By reading this book thoroughly, you can do these things easily.
- Creating functional spreadsheets that you can use for various minor and major things.
- You can create charts and integrate graphics to enhance your content visibility.
- Using conditional formatting, you can create more visual data.
- Details about add-ins in your spreadsheet.
Topics Covered
- Basic Excel
- Excel Formulas and functions
- How to create Excel charts and graphics
- Advanced Excel features
- Pivot Tables and Pivot Charts
- Programming Excel (VBA)
- Appendixes
Review of Excel 365 Bible
Approximately 33 customers recommended this Excel book by John Walkenbach and gave 4.6 ratings.
These customers recommended this book to everyone who wants to make their career in Excel or wants to master basic Excel. So if you are a beginner or an intermediate Excel user, this book is for you.
Excel Dashboards and Reports
If you’re looking to improve your skills in creating an amazing Excel dashboard and reports, this Excel book by Michael Alexander and John Walkenbach is a must.
This book is not meant for Excel beginners as it talks mostly about the dashboard, Excel charts, and Pivot Tables.
The focus is on presenting the data in the most effective and user-friendly manner. Even if you’re an intermediate or advanced Excel user, you can pick up some great tips from this book.
Best Takeaways
After thoroughly reading this book, you can easily get an insight into:
- Concepts about the dashboard and give you the tips and techniques to use it in a better way.
- You will find dashboard rules and guidelines that help you creating wonderful dashboards.
- Data analysis and reports that enhance the dashboard look and make it more effective.
- Use different perspectives to get better data visibility and divide data into different views.
- Find tools and techniques to create eye-catching visualizations, impressive design, and other such dashboards and reports.
Topics Covered
- Excel dashboards
- Charts introduction in your dashboards
- Advanced Excel charts and charting concepts
- Pivot table dashboards
- Working with the outside world
Review
More than 33 Excel pros recommended this book after reading it. As per their rating, the book has 4 stars rating.
The users recommended this book because it helps you learn how to create awesome dashboards by giving you details about the tools and techniques that let you build one. It also shows you how to be created when doing data analysis using effective Excel charts
Excel 2019 for Dummies (All-in-one) by Greg Harvey
This is a great Excel book for beginners who want to build a strong foundation. It covers all the important topics from scratch and also covers some advanced concepts.
While this book by Greg Harvey has been written for Excel 2019, you can also use this in case you have Excel 2016 or 2013.
Written by Greg Harvey, this book touches upon topics such as Excel formulas, charting, VBA/macros, as well as data management, analysis, modeling, and visualization.
Best Takeaways
- With Excel 2019 for dummies, you can make changes in the data, learn how to transfer data between worksheets, and organize information, and create graphs.
- It helps in learning how to create worksheets, to use formulas, how to integrate graphs, how to do conditional formatting Excel, and more.
Topics Covered
- Basics of Excel
- Designing of worksheet
- Excel formulas and functions
- Collaboration of worksheet
- Excel charts and graphics
- Data Management and Analysis
- Learning of Macros and VBA
Reviews
More than 103 Excel enthusiasts recommended this book. It has a 4.5-star rating and comes at an affordable price.
This all-in-one Excel book offers you all the details like creating and editing worksheets, and formulas, how to import data, and performing statistical functions. If you’re an Excel beginner and can only buy one Excel book, this should be the one.
Building Financial Models with Microsoft Excel (by Scott Proctor)
If you work in the finance domain and need to learn how to best use Excel for financial modeling, this is a great book.
Note that this is not for beginners and is meant for people looking to use Excel in finance.
It does a great job of explaining concepts and also shares some useful models that you can easily adapt to your work.
Best Takeaways
- Learn to create Financial Modelling.
- Learn to budget
- Financial statements integration like Cash flow, balance sheet, and income statements.
- Learn how to present financial models.
Topics Covered
- Operating Budget: Sales, Collections, Inventory, Purchases, Cost of Goods Sold, Expenses, Income Statement
- Financial Modeling
- Financial Budget: Capital and Cash Budget
- Cash flows and dashboard
- Financial Statements
- Valuation
- Capitalization
- Financial Ratios
- Sensitivity Analysis
- Contribution Margin Analysis
Reviews
Around 15 people who bought this book also recommended this as a good Excel resource.
It has 3-star ratings. This is the best Excel book for those who want to learn about financial modeling. The book is mainly purchased by professionals who want an in-depth knowledge of advanced Excel.
Power Pivot and Power BI: The Excel User’s Guide to DAX, Power Query, Power BI & Power Pivot
This book is meant for people who want to learn Power Pivot and Power BI. It’s not meant for beginners and get this only when you have a good grasp in Excel Pivot tables and other basic concepts.
So far, this Excel book by Rob Collie and Avichal Singh is the best resource to learn about Power Pivot and Power BI.
Best Takeaways
- A complete guide for Excel pivot tables, relationships, and databases.
- Teach you the basics of DAX, Power Pivot, Power Query, and Power BI.
- This is a perfect guide for professionals and students.
- If you want to take an idea and core knowledge of any topic related to excel then this book is for you.
Topics
The book is an amalgamation of various things including Power Query, Power BI, PowerPivot, and DAX.
This Excel book is not recommended for the beginners, the person must have the basic idea of the pivot table and databases.
Review
The book is recommended by approximately 33 readers and they gave this book 4.5-star ratings.
This Power Pivot and Power BI book is best for the users who want to learn Power Pivot. In this book, you can take its golden tips and tricks.
Excel Macros for Dummies
If you’re a VBA beginner, this Excel book by Michael Alexander is a great starting point. It covers all the basics first, so you’re never lost, and helps you build a strong Excel VBA foundation.
Once you’re done with this book, you can move to more advanced VBA programming books.
Best Takeaways
- The Excel Macros for Dummies is written by Michael Alexander. He is a Microsoft Certified Application Developer and is named by Microsoft as an MVP. The author has 15 years of experience in consulting and developing office solutions, as well as sharing basic access with excel tips.
- Each and every topic covered how to apply macros with complete explanations and instructions given. You can learn here how you can customize your application as per your preference and the way you want.
- You can implement excel macros easily, and you can work with workbooks, worksheets, and ranges.
- You can streamline your workflow as there is a macro that will solve your problems. There is no requirement for a programmer for further customizations.
Topics Covered
- Macro fundamentals Overview
- How to create and build workbooks
- Getting started with VBA
- How to automate your reports
- Retrieving external data sources
- How to send emails from Excel
- How to clean up your data
Reviews
More than 45 users gave a 4.5 rating and recommended this Excel book. This is one good starting point for VBA beginners to learn and level up their VBA Excel skills.
In this Excel book, you will find 70 excel macros that you can customize according to your wish for immediate use.
Excel Formulas & Functions for Dummies
This Excel book focuses on giving you a complete overview of Excel formulas and functions.
It doesn’t just give you the different Excel functions and how to use these but also shares a lot of useful formulas that you can use in your day-to-day work.
Best takeaways
- The user can use excel functions and understand how this function works in the formula.
- How to use 150 in-built excel functions to solve problems by crunching numbers.
- Different ways to calculate investments, and you can track your expenses.
- Help in making good financial decisions by comparing rates in excel
- It tells you all your excel functions that help in solving problems related to cost, interest rates, and ROI. You can learn different predicting factors used for forecast and get details of current trends.
- Learn different ways to diversify data from the database. How to use HLookup and VLookup as well as the If statement
Topics Covered
- Top 10 functions you must know
- Amortization table
- Working with dates and times
- Correction of formula errors
- Database Functions
- Manage Inventory
- Real-world examples
- How to use excel for decision making
Reviews
More than 44 customers recommended this Excel book and have given 4.5 ratings.
This is an excellent book to learn all Excel functions and formulas that help in making a financial decisions like securing a mortgage, computing grades, buying a car or home, calculating investment performance, and other functions.
Excel VBA Programming for Dummies
Another Excel book by the duo Michael Alexander and John Walkenbach. This is a beginner-level Excel resource to learn about VBA programming.
Even if you have never learned anything about VBA or programming, you can still pick this one and learn a lot. Once you have a good basic level of understanding, you can move to other advanced VBA books.
Best Takeaways
- Get complete details about VBA and learn how to automate tasks, use add-ins, and commands, and develop macro-driven applications.
- You can learn to create custom functions in the user interface of Excel. You can design user-based applications and work on them.
- Explore a different range of objects and create various Excel user forms.
- You can take the data analysis and your programming skills to the next level so that you can implement VBA.
Topics Covered
- VBA Advantages and disadvantages
- Working on Excel object hierarchy
- How to handle errors
- How to create macros
- Properties and methods of useful range objects
- Custom solutions that fit according to your needs
- How to solve bugs coming in between code
Reviews
Around 140 users recommended this Excel book and gave 4.5 ratings.
Many of the people mentioned that this Excel book covers all the basics and has a clear teaching approach. Just follow examples and learn the step-by-step process. If you want to improve your Excel VBA skills, then you must buy this Excel book.
Professional Excel Development: The Definitive Guide to Developing Applications Using Microsoft Excel, VBA, and .NET
This Excel book is meant for people who want to develop applications using Excel and .NET. It isn’t meant for you if you use Excel for your day-to-day work and is geared towards developers.
Best Takeaways
- You will find a hands-on case study project that helps you practicing of planning, architecture, and building Excel applications.
- The book is written by four authors, out of which three of them are honored by Excel MVPs. With this book, they offered complete guidance to build powerful, robust, and secure applications.
- Applications in excel are getting more complex and the platform of website development is getting more powerful. Hence a developer needs some tutorial or guidance that helps in solving a problem for the next level of sophistication. Hence the professional excel development book is specially designed for those developers.
Topics Covered
- Excel with Web Services integration
- Deploy applications
- How to design worksheets
- In-Built add-ins
- You can construct applications
- Windows API calls
- Make you master in error handling, debugging, and optimization of VBA
- Learn visualization solutions
- How to work with VB.Net
Reviews
The Excel book is recommended by many users, and they have rated this book 4.5.
This is specially designed for developers as this is the only book that offers in-depth insight into Excel programming. You can build powerful applications using various Microsoft technologies.
Learn Excel 2016 Expert Skills
Best Takeaways
- By reading this book, your skills will be greater or broader than other users, and you can very well understand all the Excel features.
- You will find that the instructions are logically designed in the form of sessions and lessons. It caters to self-learning and teaching period. Make sure that you must complete every single lesson each day.
- This is not a beginner’s book and does not cover any basics of excel. If you are one level upside of a beginner, then Excel 2016 Essential Skills book is for you. Make sure that you must know all the basics of excel.
- Each and every concept is described in simple English. No jargon is used to make you learn easily.
- The book is most preferred by Excel teachers as it is designed in such a way that it teaches Excel not to look like reference books. It has the best methodology that clearly defines the objective of every learning session.
Topics Covered
- Separation of OLAP skills from mainstream Excel skills
- How to apply simple filters and custom filters to a range
- How to apply an advanced filter
- A quick analysis of the total and percentage
- How to convert the range into a table
- A custom table-style creation
- Sort a range by rows and columns
- How to create an automatic structured table reference
Reviews
This is the most preferred Excel book by users who want to learn excel, not a reference book but a tutorial.
Users who read this book have given five ratings to this book. It teaches you the true excel expert level.
Last Word
Excel Books that are listed above are recommended by real Excel users. You don’t need all these books, and each of these books has its own plus point.
If you are a beginner, then go for the Excel 2016/2019 Bible or Excel 2016 for Dummies. User who are not beginners and wants to learn formulas and functions then buy Excel Formulas & Functions for Dummies as well as Learn Excel 2016 Expert Skills.
If you are professional and your objective is to create dashboards, then go for Excel Dashboards and Reports, whereas, for financial modeling, we recommend you buy Building financial models with Excel.
For developers, the best book is Professional Excel Development, from where they can get insight view and in-depth Excel programming skills, whereas to learn VBA Programming, you can buy Excel VBA for Dummies and Excel Macros for Dummies.
If you want to learn the pivot table only, then go for Power Pivot and Power BI. This is how you can buy Best Excel Books via this post. Thanks!!
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