2) Noble House

3) Excel by Que Publishing

There are certainly other reasons that contributed greatly to Office's monopoly but I don't see FUD as one of any consequence.

(A good read, like most any one of his pieces - nothing wrong with his writing talent, obviously ...)

Twenty unsorted banana boxes: every book just becomes a blur (as in, “Oh great, another Danielle Steele novel, and another bible, and another Excel 97 for dummies, …”).

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/office/ff838238%28v=...

Close behind are Collections and UDTs. The best thing to level up after you're comfortable is with 'Implements' for interfaces.

I found that search engines are as good as any book for this stuff. It's smeared all over the internet.

The best place I know of to get a good understanding is http://www.cpearson.com/excel/MainPage.aspx, but it's not a tutorial.

edit: that's what I get for keeping this window open too long:) That's 2 votes for cpearson.com.

Parentheses FTW!

But yeah, I wouldn't want to write Excel in procedural C.

Stiff market too. $22 for "Excel 2016 Formulas and Functions" - https://www.amazon.com/Formulas-Functions-Content-Program-Mr...

$15 for "Excel Formulas and Functions For Dummies" - https://www.amazon.com/Excel-Formulas-Functions-Dummies-Blut...

$5 for "Excel Formulas (Quick Study Computer)" - https://www.amazon.com/Excel-Formulas-Quick-Study-Computer/d...

$33 for "Excel 2016 Formulas (Mr. Spreadsheet's Bookshelf)" - https://www.amazon.com/Excel-2016-Formulas-Spreadsheets-Book...

https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=imoPAQAAMAAJ&q=excel+4.0...

I've found searching the web for things like "when was the fill handle introduced" or "who invented the fill handle" or "what's the history of the fill handle" gives hopeless results.

That being said, intros to options scare me in the same way a "Beginner's Guide to Fugu Preparation' would scare me: as a novice, you have no business mucking around with such dangerous things, but as an initiate, you have no need of the article.

Still, there is a readership for such things, and the author is clear to point out the potentially unlimited downside in the intro.

Now, scripting Excel with Python? I'd forgotten about these guys. My interest is officially re-piqued.

Yes, exactly.

If we're being uncharitable, we can spin Greenspun's 10th rule[1] of programming as:

>"Any sufficiently complicated Excel spreadsheet contains an ad-hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of a proper centralized database."

Or, if we're being charitable, we frame it as an internal MVP (Minimum Viable Product):

>"Spreadsheets are the internal 'mvp' that proves the business value before you build the centralized systems. When the spreadsheet becomes unmaintable spaghetti formulas and the xls email workflow crushes under its own weight, that will give the company the evidence and the confidence to spend $1 million and migrate the spreadsheet to a proper centralized database."

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenspun%27s_tenth_rule

I think it takes a certain amount of bravery to accept that there are no "experts" when it comes to predicting the future.