keyliner.blogspot.com: September 2025

2025-09-05

Book: Real World Excel

keyliner has published a new book on Amazon called "Real World Excel." This is the book that shows how to solve day-to-day business problems. 570 mostly amazing pages. Version 2025.09

Search Amazon for "Real World Excel" (use quotes)

For Student Files, see bottom of this article

About this book:

The book is intended for beginning to intermediate Excel users.

Sure, YouTube and AI can do the same thing, but I suspect this book is faster, and it is definitely more guided and better curated. Written by an honest-to-god real human, I show how to solve real problems. Learn the tips and tricks you need to get real work done.

How do I know this stuff? I've spent decades beating data into submission and people are constantly asking me how to do this-and-that. This book distills my experience into one place. Keep-in-mind, this is not a reference guide; instead, it is a training book.

Topics include:
Basic Excel formulas and navigation,

along with:
Parsing Names and Addresses
TaxTable lookups
Importing csv and txt files without screwing things up
Pivot Tables
xLookups to solve the most interesting problems
Picture clauses
Custom functions - write your own Excel verbs
and useful formulas galore

There are about 700 illustrations, each cropped and annotated, and they show exactly what is needed for the topic being discussed. There are no paper-wasting full-screenshots here.

Sample illustration, snipped directly from the book

When a formula or concept is described, I show exactly what you need to know, and I show the errors and bugs you might encounter. Things like leading zeroes being accidentally stripped, date-conversions gone awry, parsing names from badly-formed lists, and numbers masquerading as text; all are shown with clear examples.

Another fabulous sample illustration

Sample Student Files:

There are dozens of Student files that accompany the book (see link, below). The files are downloadable any time, without registration, and they save you from building your own test data. Many of the files contain actual data. For example, the ASCII text import chapters use a 30,000-row sheet containing U.S. Census data. The Pivot Table chapter has 6,000 rows in its example file.

Why such hefty Student files? How else will you learn the keystrokes to navigate such monstrosities? These are things you see in your day-to-day work and the chapters reflect that.

Yet another Excel book?

There must be a thousand books on Excel, but I think I approach teaching differently than most and I believe my book is better. A conversational style that does not spend much time on theory. After Chapter 1, this book gets into the details you need to be productive. Steps are clearly marked as 1, 2, 3.

$ For roughly the price of a nice lunch, this will save endless hours watching videos.

Publishing as a Kindle paperback allows me the space to be detailed and it keeps the price low. At nearly 600 pages, this is clearly a labor of love. Kindle takes a large chunk of the book sales, so this is not a money-making adventure. And it is neat you can order this book, have it custom-printed, and be on your doorstep in about 4 days. Remarkable.

At this time, I am only publishing a paper-edition. Reason: It is easier to read, follow, and bounce around than on an eReader. Because this is a print-replica textbook, it does not fit well on a smaller screen. Your thoughts welcome.

This is not magic. In order to do this right, you have to devote energy and work through the examples. Once you are done, your coworkers will come to you for dating advice and for your spreadsheet-wisdom. This is my goal.

Student File Downloads

Open this Public GDrive link and download the student workbook files.
The files are in a standard .zip folder, with expansion steps in Chapter 1.

* For the download, there is no logon, no registration, no nags, no advertisements. I cannot tell or track who downloads.

GDrive Link:
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1WO0dGEG6lnlkbkDi1ETQN8DahN4irkA9?usp=drive_link

Folder: "RealWorldExcel" File: RealWorldExcel-StudentFiles-Ver1.02.zip

.ZIP MD5 Checksum: 3a-86-f2-34-02-20-a4-10-ba-5b-f3-e0-d7-fd-44-b4

SHA256: c8e012362868da744856db657fcaf32507f156c8e346db64dba4fcccf0d612ec

- Leaving a review helps everyone, including me. I want to hear about your progress, and I use your comments to make improvements. If something is not clear, or you find a section cumbersome, drop me a note. Visit keyliner.com "about".

Other books by keyliner
Search Amazon for:

"War and Peace Programming in C#"
(Six volumes, 2,200 pages, 1,100 illustrations. A porker-of-a-book that scares everyone when they first see it, but it is amazing in what it covers. Yes, you can learn to program! Start with the Student Guide.)

"Adventures with WordPerfect"
(Writing books with WordPerfect)
-- this very book was written with these techniques. Very professional looking, eh?)

keyliner book: "Term Papers with WordPerfect"
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FSYTWSW5

(For college students. A smaller, tighter version than Adventures.)

Thank you for your consideration.
I wish you the best in your studies.

Search Amazon "Real World Excel" with quote-marks,  by Tim Wolf

2025-09-04

Book: Term Papers with WordPerfect

Book: Term Papers with WordPerfect

keyliner has published a new book, "Term Papers with WordPerfect" -- a sister book to the previously published "Adventures with WordPerfect".

Amazon Link: "Term Papers with WordPerfect"
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FSYTWSW5

This book is a subset of the larger, more complicated book and is targeted specifically to students and other manuscript writers. This book shows how to use your word processor to write professional Term Papers, manuscripts, thesis papers, and other long documents.

If you need to write Term Papers or a thesis, glance at this older keyliner article: Using WordPerfect for Term Papers.

But for the past year, this has bothered me. That article is too short to do justice and my other book, "Adventures with WordPerfect", although great, is overkill for a college term paper or thesis. I fixed the problem by writing a shorter, more distilled book, "Term Papers with WordPerfect".

This book shows how you can do this

Edit large documents with complete control over formatting
No-nonsense footers -- easy to write in WordPerfect; damn-near impossible in Word
Automatic Table-of-Contents
Easy Page-Referencing (as in, "See Page xx")
Block Protect section headers with their text; no more unsightly page breaks; no more managing page-breaks by hand
First-of-Section - Force Page Odd, and other handy controls
Learn all of the best keystrokes, saving you time
Learn how to do graphics the right way -- both creating them and importing them into your document.
and more

WordPerfect? Seriously?

I tell people it takes five minutes to learn the basics of WordPerfect, and another 20 minutes to be proficient. With this book and another few hours, you will be a master.

I know there is already some friction, with some of you saying, "I already own MSWord (or GoogleDocs), why would I want to spend the time and money on a new word processor?"

My answer is simple: Your sanity is worth something. Not yelling at your word processor is worth something. And time is valuable. WordPerfect is not without faults, but you will find it simply behaves better. It is worth the trouble.

I also own MS Word but I seldom use it. Even for my day-to-day word processing needs, I stick with WordPerfect. I suspect you will be a convert too.

WordPerfect does things that Word cannot. For example, WordPerfect has a unique way of handling its formatting. Formatting, such as a Bold, Font, or Tab changes, are all tracked in a feature called "Reveal Codes". Every code, every character, every change-of-heart, is tracked by these codes and the codes are all visible. Nothing is hidden.

Click for a larger view

This means when some word or sentence mis-behaves, it is easy to see why, and more importantly, easy-to-fix without re-typing.

My Recommendation

If you have a big project, buy this book (naturally, I'd say that). Then download Corel's WordPerfect Home and Student Edition for a free 30-day trial. For about the price of a nice lunch, you can kick the tires and try this out. You can easily go through the most important parts of this book in just a few evenings.

When you do this, pay close attention to the setup in Chapter 1, as well as the keystroke chapter.

"Term Papers with WordPerfect" does not have the chapter or style-complexities needed by a full-fledged book. Nor does it spend time on how to publish. I carefully cut and tightened the TermPaper book to be more succinct, with many new graphics.

Links:
Amazon link: Book: Adventures with WordPerfect
https://www.amazon.com/Adventures-WordPerfect-Writing-Books/dp/B0CRZD2QPR

Amazon link: Book: Term Papers with WordPerfect
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FSYTWSW5

Amazon link: Books: War and Peace Programming in C#
https://www.blogger.com/blog/post/edit/1585105787473796476/4797889075679590116#

Amazon link: Book: Real World Excel
https://www.amazon.com/Real-World-Excel-Tim-Wolf/dp/B0FRSJP1JV

Articles (somewhat dated now)
keyliner: Using WordPerfect for Term Papers
keyliner: WordPerfect -- why this instead of MSWord

2025-09-01

Book: Adventures with WordPerfect

keyliner has written a book, Adventures with WordPerfect -- a book about how to write books using WordPerfect.

Amazon link:
https://www.amazon.com/Adventures-WordPerfect-Writing-Books/dp/B0CRZD2QPR

This book shows how to write books with WordPerfect.

In here, learn how to make a multi-chapter book, with a table-of-contents, indexing, footnotes, and end-notes. The document can be as large as you could imagine, and everything will work.

As you will learn, to do this right, it is not just one long continuous document. As can be imagined, a 300 page book (or even 700 pages) becomes unmanageable. WordPerfect has a unique way to tame and organize your writings.

This book shows how you can do this

Edit multi-chapter books
Only the chapter you are currently working on needs to be exposed
Set "Styles" -- controlling the look-and-feel of chapter headers, section headings, indentations, margin releases, and the like
Change the style one time and all chapters absorb the change -- this means consistency throughout your document
Automatic Table-of-Contents
Back-of-book Indexing
Easy Page-Referencing (as in, "See Page xx")
Block Protect section headers with their text; no more unsightly page breaks; no more managing page-breaks by hand
First-of-Chapter - Force Page Odd, and other handy controls
Learn all of the best keystrokes, saving you time
Learn graphics the right way -- both creating them and importing them into your document.
Complete steps for publishing to Kindle (just like this book)

Seriously, WordPerfect?

I tell people it takes five minutes to learn the basics of WordPerfect, and another 20 minutes to be proficient. With this book and another few hours, you will be a master.

I know there is some friction, with some of you saying, "I already own MSWord (or GoogleDocs), why would I want to spend the time and money on a new word processor?"

My answer is simple: Your sanity is worth something. Not yelling at your word processor is worth something. And time is valuable. WordPerfect is not without faults, but you will find it simply behaves better. It is worth the trouble.

I also own MS Word but I seldom use it. Even for my day-to-day word processing needs, I stick with WordPerfect. I suspect you will be a convert too.

WordPerfect does things that Word cannot and it does it in a way that is less confusing. You will be pleasantly surprised.

WordPerfect has a unique way of handling its formatting. Formatting, such as a Bold, Font, or Tab-setting change, are all tracked in a feature called "Reveal Codes". Every code, every character, every change-of-heart, is tracked by these codes, and the codes are all visible. Nothing is hidden.

Click for a larger view

This means when some word or sentence mis-behaves, it is easy to see why, and more importantly, easy-to-fix without deleting and re-typing.

Fundamentally, WP behaves differently than Word. Word anchors most formatting changes to a paragraph and those changes stay with that paragraph -- even if it is copied and moved-about.

On the other hand, WordPerfect drops a code at the cursor position and that change flows down through the document until told to change. (Sure, it can also highlight a paragraph and make its change there, but by default, it is a "set one time and it sticks" mentality)

For example, my book, Real World Excel is nearly 600 pages long, 18 chapters, 700 illustrations. One day I decided to change the font from Arial, 11 points to Century School, 10 points. One change at the top of the main document and it cascaded through all chapters. All chapter heading (with a larger font), all subheadings, all italics, all bolds --- all changed to the new font and the font change was proportional.

More importantly, even though every page was wildly-reformatted, all graphics stayed where they were supposed to, and all page-breaks behaved. In other words, with only a five minute review, the entire book re-formatted and all was well.

My Recommendation

If you have a big project, buy this book (naturally, I'd say that). Then download Corel WordPerfect's Home and Student Edition for a free 30-day trial. For about the price of a nice lunch, you can kick the tires and try this out. You can easily go through the most important parts of this book in a few evenings.

When you do this, pay close attention to the setup in Chapter 1, as well as the keystroke chapter.

Shorter Projects - Term Papers

If you need to write Term Papers or a thesis, glance at this keyliner article: Using WordPerfect for Term Papers. The trouble is that article is too short to do justice and this book, "Adventures with WordPerfect", although great, is overkill for a college term paper or thesis. I fixed the problem by writing a shorter, more distilled book, "Term Papers with WordPerfect".

Links:
Amazon link: Book: Adventures with WordPerfect
https://www.amazon.com/Adventures-WordPerfect-Writing-Books/dp/B0CRZD2QPR