To get the most out of this book

Just like knowing how to open the hood (bonnet) of your car to replace the oil and spark plugs, being able to look under the hood of Excel will give you a lot more power. This book will take you through this step by step and explain things in a way that an Excel Power user can easily understand. But be aware that you will sometimes get oil on your hands – not everything will be as tidy as the way Microsoft delivers the Office apps.

These are the requirements to get the most out of this book:

You should be familiar with Excel – for example, know what a spreadsheet is, how to open files, input formulas, save and rename files, and so on. It is not necessary to be a Power user (for example, using advanced formulas, Visual Basic for Excel, or other scripting tools), but having tried these tools will help you appreciate the full power of business rules we are giving you in this book.

You should be very familiar with using a web browser. While the book describes Business Central and Azure Web Portal in a way that is no more complex than a typical travel booking site, a moderate amount of web literacy is assumed, as we focus on the pages, not the browser.

You should be comfortable with breaking a big problem into smaller problems and solving each in turn. Most Excel users will do this naturally when writing formulas, and the book assumes you will use the tools described to solve your problem rather than expecting a full ready-to-go solution.

For Chapter 10, you should know how to install software on your computer. Full instructions are given to install Docker Desktop, which is a convenient container giving you the confidence that the examples will work on your computer exactly as they do in the book. You will need to download and run a graphical installer and troubleshoot minor issues (for example, if you need an admin password to proceed with the installation). We do give alternatives, as not every computer setup is the same, and sometimes things just don’t work.

You should be comfortable asking for help. This could be as simple as googling common error messages to find how other people solve the problem, reading documentation (pointers provided!) as you write your own business rules, or even asking more technical colleagues or open source community members nicely for support.

While the book assumes you have no coding experience and always gives a simple, non-technical route, there are (additional) appendices that will allow more technical colleagues to support you if you want to explore these areas.

For a technical book, the list of must-have tools is surprisingly short, since we use freely available online tools where possible.

In fact, it is possible to get a lot of value from the book with only a web browser. However, since Excel (both laptop and online) is available as a free trial from Microsoft, we highly recommend installing it, as you will learn so much more – especially in Chapters 6 and 7.

The most demanding chapter (in terms of the hardware specifications needed to run the tools) is Chapter 10, where we use Docker – most laptops sold in the last 5 years will be able to support it, and alternatives (such as using the cloud instead) are given.

If you are using the digital version of this book, we advise you to type the code yourself or access the code from the book’s GitHub repository (a link is available in the next section). Doing so will help you avoid any potential errors related to the copying and pasting of code.