Conventions and Organization of Files

To gain the full benefit of this book, you must have access to the accompanying Excel workbooks. We make constant reference to a variety of objects in Excel, and you must actively work with Excel while reading this book. Because changing parameters and seeing the results are so crucial to our approach, we have adopted several conventions that will help you navigate through our materials.

In this book, a figure refers to a variety of graphics, including charts and pictures of portions of a sheet. We often display a chart or range of cells in a figure in the printed book, but we want you to look at the live version on your computer screen. Thus, in addition to a caption, many figures have a source line indicating their location in the Excel workbook. We follow Excel's naming convention for workbooks and sheets: [workbookname]sheetname. For example, if the source says, “[SimEq.xls]Data,” then you know the figure can be found in the SimEq.xls workbook in the Data sheet. We will always italicize sheet names in the printed text to help you locate the proper sheet in a workbook.