By reading this book and following the practice exercises scattered liberally throughout the chapters, you can learn to develop powerful and innovative reporting solutions using Microsoft Excel 2003. This book's step-by-step approach can help you steadily gain confidence in your ability to use Excel's reporting functions as you enhance your skills by working through the hands-on examples.

You don't have to know Structured Query Language (SQL) to get real value from this book. However, readers who are familiar with SQL programming will probably get the most out of it. Indeed, many SQL programmers find that Excel report development is the next logical progression in their technology education. Still, even if you are only an experienced user of Excel, you will learn a substantial amount about Excel reporting, especially in the earlier chapters where the graphical Excel tools are used to build SQL queries that run against external data sources such as delimited files, spreadsheets, databases, and data cubes.
If you're new to Excel reports, you should start with Part I of the book. Advanced users who are already familiar with Excel's reporting features and with external data sources can skip to Part II, where the core features, functions, and components of Excel reports are covered. The appendixes in Part III provide references for installing the NorthwindCS database, configuring your Windows operating system to display extensions for known file types, and using basic SQL.