Excel 2002 for Dummies

Greg Harvey is a product of the great American Midwest, born in the Chicago-land area in 1949 (thus his saying "I'm only as old as China," - Red China, that is) in the dark ages of the Cold War before the age of McDonald's, MTV, and, certainly, personal computers. On the shores of Lake Michigan, he learned his letters and numbers and showed great promise in the world of academia (quickly achieving Red Bird reading status after being put back as a Yellow Bird due to an unforeseen bout of chicken pox at the start of the school year). After earning many gold stars along with a few red, he graduated from Roosevelt School (named for Teddy, not that socialist Delano) in 1963. During his stint at Thornridge High School in the perfectly boring Chicago suburb of Dolton, Illinois (named for Tom Dolton, the gunslinger?), he found great solace in Motown music (thanks Phil!) and the drama department (to this day, he can recite every line from the play Auntie Mame, verbatim). Bored with what passed for academic studies, he went through high school in three years. Looking back on these formative years, Greg was sure thankful for the great tunes and Auntie's philosophy, "Life's a banquet, kid, and some poor suckers are starving." In 1966 (ah, the Sixties), he entered the University of Illinois at Urbana, Illinois, where he was greatly influenced by such deep philosophers as Abbie Hoffman and Mahatma Gandhi. In the summer of 1968, he purchased his first pair of handmade sandals (from Glen, a hippie sandal maker who'd just returned from the Summer of Love in San Francisco). During his college years, he became quite political. He holds the distinction of being one of a handful of men and women to attend the "camp-out" protest against women's dorm curfews (back then, not only were dorms not sexually integrated, but women were locked up at 11 p.m. on weeknights, 1 a.m. on weekends) and the last one to leave after all the others went back to their dorms. During his subsequent college years, he became a regular at the Red Herring coffee house, the veritable den of SDS activity on campus. In addition to anti-war protests, Greg attended various and sundry classes in the Liberal Arts (such as they were in the last half of the 20th century). In the end, he took a major in Classical studies (ancient Greek and Latin) and a split minor in American History and French (Greg showed a facility for foreign language, probably stemming from the fact that he's always had a big mouth). In the course of his Classical studies, he was introduced to his first computer-based training, learning basic Latin with a CAI program called what else but Plato! At the beginning of 1971 (January 12, in fact), Greg migrated West from Chicago to San Francisco (with flowers in his hair). Deciding it was high time to get a skill so that he could find a real job, he enrolled in the Drafting and Design program at Laney College in Oakland. After that, he spent nine years working over a hot drafting table, drawing (by hand, mind you) orthographic and perspective plans for various and sundry engineering projects. During his last engineering gig, he worked with a proprietary CAD software package developed by Bechtel Engineering that not only generated the drawings, but kept track of the materials actually needed to create the stuff. In 1981, following his engineering career, Greg went back to school at San Francisco State University, this time to earn his secondary teaching credential. Upon completion of his teacher training, he bought one of the very first IBM personal computers (with 16K and a single 160K floppy disk!) to help with lesson preparation and student bookkeeping. He still vividly remembers poring over the premier issue of PC World magazine for every piece of information that could teach him how to make peace with his blankety, blankety personal computer. Instead of landing a teaching job at the high school or community college (because there weren't any at the time), Greg got a job with a small software outfit, ITM, that was creating an online database of software information (well ahead of its time). As part of his duties, Greg reviewed new software programs (like Microsoft Word 1.0 and Lotus 1-2-3 Release 1) and wrote articles for business users. After being laid off from this job right after the Christmas party in 1983 (the first of several layoffs from high-tech startups), Greg wrote his first computer book on word processing software for Hayden Books (as a result of a proposal he helped to write while still employed full-time at ITM). After that, Greg worked in various software evaluation and training jobs. After a few more high-tech, software testing and evaluation jobs in Silicon Valley, Greg turned to software training to get, as he put it, "the perspective of the poor schmoe at the end of the terminal." During the next three years, Greg trained a whole plethora of software programs to business users of all skill levels for several major independent software-training companies in the San Francisco bay area. In the fall of 1986, he hooked up with Sybex, a local computer book publisher, for whom he wrote his second computer training book, Mastering SuperCalc. And the rest, as they say, is history. To date, Greg is the author of over 30 books on using computer software, with the titles created under the Dummies aegis for Hungry Minds, Inc., being among his all-time favorites. In mid-1993, Greg started a new multimedia publishing venture called Mind over Media. As a multimedia developer, he hopes to enliven his future computer books by making them into true interactive learning experiences that will vastly enrich and improve the training of users of all skill levels. You can send him e-mail at gharvey@mindovermedia.com and visit his Web site at www.mindovermedia.com. In 1999, Greg began graduate school at the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS) in San Francisco. In the summer of 2000, he received his Masters degree in Philosophy and Religion in the area of Asian and Comparative Studies. In the fall of that year, he entered the Ph.D. program at CIIS, where he is now concentrating on the study of the classical Chinese and Tibetan languages and the study of Chinese philosophy and religion.Harvey, Greg is the author of 'Excel 2002 for Dummies' with ISBN 9780764508226 and ISBN 0764508229.