By Woody Leonhard, Lee Hudspeth, and T.J. Lee

Excel is a feature rich development environment that is limited primarily by the user's imagination. And the central canvas for this development effort is the workbook. This is the file Excel produces to hold the various worksheets, charts, macros, etc., that make up your model.

Now, before you toss this book as a boring jargon feast, let's define some terms. Development environment simply means that if you want something in Excel you're gonna have to build it yourself, or use a template that someone else has built for you. This can be as simple as saying, "If you want to add up a column of numbers in Excel you're going to have to input the numbers, and create a formula to sum them." The term model we use to mean this "thing" that you're going to build. We could say document to mean the same thing, so don't let the stuffy terms throw you.

In this chapter, we'll start off with the workbook and drill down through the basics of model building.

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