Bruce White - Spreadsheets for Librarians: Getting Results with Excel and Google Sheets

Preface

I hope that you enjoy reading this book as much as I have enjoyed writing it but that it requires rather less effort. If you dont enjoy reading books about spreadsheets, which is a real possibility, then my next and more realistic hope is that you will find it useful, and that is its true purpose. Indeed books are for use was S. R. Ranganathans first law of library science, while his second and third laws were every person their book and every book its reader, so if you are a librarian wanting to know about spreadsheets, then this should be very much your book. But that will only be true if it is able to fulfil Ranganathans fourth law, which is that it should save the time of the readera heavy responsibility indeed.

Time is never really wasted, however, and the many hours I have spent struggling over rows and columns and creating ornate formulas that still didnt tell me what I actually wanted to know has given me an extensive knowledge of how not to do it, of tricks that didnt produce magic results, and shortcuts that led at high speed in the wrong direction. Out of this I hope some practical knowledge of how to do it more or less right has been distilled that will make you a beneficiary of some of those otherwise unproductive hours.

While it may not be immediately obvious that the world needs another book on spreadsheets, it is becoming increasingly clear that the world does need librarians, and if this book helps them to do their work better while also saving time, then it will be playing its part in making it a better place. I dont claim to exceptional spreadsheet expertise, and some of you may have cause to shake your heads at times at some of the choices I have made, but I hope that what I do bring to the task is a store of practical experience of spreadsheet-based data analysis enlivened with a generous portion of enthusiasm and optimism. A key aspect of any skill is knowing when to use it and understanding its potentialand sometimes its limitations! Developing a spreadsheet imagination will require an investment of time but, providing you keep the end goal of saving time and improving the scope of your work in view, it will be worth it.

I have tried to keep my explanations simple and straightforward, and to avoid too much jargon, but there will be times when you are seized with an urge to hurl the book across the room and give up entirely. As librarians you should resist the former urge and instead put it aside to come back to in a few days time. And remember, while it has been written to read as a journey, you dont all need to get to the end, or at least not right away. Some of the material is complex, and I defy anyone to describe a pivot table without resorting to showing, so if you are struggling and feeling that its all rather beyond you, then that is normal too.