Ian Lamont's Blog - Posts Tagged "how-to"
Why “Excel Basics In 30 Minutes” took so long to create
Excel Basics In 30 Minutes, abasic Excel manual and the third In 30 Minutes™ title, was released about a month ago.
The writing and production processes associated with Excel Basics In 30 Minutes took twice as long as those for my previous two books about Dropbox and Google Drive. Why? I see three reasons:
The complexity of spreadsheets. Demonstrating something as simple as addition or calculating a percentage require several discreet steps and screenshots. All of this had to be explained, and the total length of the Spreadsheets book was about 40% longer than the Dropbox book — mostly because of extra screenshots (100 in all!)
Multiple versions of Excel. There is basically only one version of Dropbox and Google Drive floating around. Excel has many commercial versions currently in use. There are significant differences between them, which required additional writing and testing.
I included Google Spreadsheets as well. My reasoning: Most spreadsheets are basically the same, and not everyone owns or wants to own Excel. I thought including explanations of how to do the same tasks in Excel and Google Spreadsheets would be a good idea — but it took extra time to include those explanations.
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The writing and production processes associated with Excel Basics In 30 Minutes took twice as long as those for my previous two books about Dropbox and Google Drive. Why? I see three reasons:
The complexity of spreadsheets. Demonstrating something as simple as addition or calculating a percentage require several discreet steps and screenshots. All of this had to be explained, and the total length of the Spreadsheets book was about 40% longer than the Dropbox book — mostly because of extra screenshots (100 in all!)
Multiple versions of Excel. There is basically only one version of Dropbox and Google Drive floating around. Excel has many commercial versions currently in use. There are significant differences between them, which required additional writing and testing.
I included Google Spreadsheets as well. My reasoning: Most spreadsheets are basically the same, and not everyone owns or wants to own Excel. I thought including explanations of how to do the same tasks in Excel and Google Spreadsheets would be a good idea — but it took extra time to include those explanations.
Read the rest of this post ...
Announcing Twitter In 30 Minutes, 2nd Edition
I’m pleased to announce the 2nd edition of our popular Twitter user guide, Twitter In 30 Minutes: How to connect with interesting people, write great tweets, and find information that’s relevant to you. Released this week, it's available in several different formats, including ebook (Kindle, iOS/iPad, and Google Play), paperback, and PDF versions. As part of the launch promotion, I am giving away 10 free electronic editions (more on that here) and I will also talk a little bit about the guide itself, including what’s new and why I wrote a second edition of the guide, considering the first edition was released less than a year ago!The original 1st edition of Twitter In 30 Minutes was released in ...
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