Many people see the markets moving up or down but have no idea of risk or rate of return of their personal investments. Andreas Steiner's web site provides a wealth of information on investment performance and many Excel templates that you can download for free. Keep in mind that that header on the downloads page states The downloads provided on this page are free and designed for educational purposes. They are meant to be illustrations to be used at your own risk, not productive applications.

There are a number of Excel book excerpts available around the web:

• Links to excerpts from four of John Walkenbach's 2007 books are available at The Spreadsheet Page.
• From the book titled Microsoft Office Excel 2003 Programming Inside Out, the chapter titled Creating Advanced User Forms is available.
• Several chapters are available from the book titled Microsoft Excel Data Analysis and Business Modeling. They are Determine the Optimal Product Mix with Solver, Introduction to optimization with the Excel Solver Tool, and Pick Your Fantasy Football Team with Solver.
• From the book titled Excel 2007 VBA Programmer's Reference, the chapter titled Primer in Excel VBA is available via Wiley.
• Links to excerpts from several chapters of the book titled Professional Excel Development are available at Stephen Bullen's Office Automation site. The chapter on RibbonX might be of special interest given the changes in Excel 2007.

Below are a few blog posts that I found especially useful:

• Jon Peltier recently posted articles titled 9 Steps to Simpler Chart Formatting and Overlapped Bar Chart - Thinner Bars in Front.
• John Walkenbach recently posted an article dealing with Color Contrast Functions with a tip titled Quantifying Color Choices. I found this post to be useful because many of the people I work with tend to use multiple background colors to highlight different types of information. As they use more and more colors, their spreadsheets become more and more distracting and difficult to read. On top of that, color printers don't always replicate the spreadsheet colors as intended so your printed copies look totally different from what you see on the screen.