Excel Basics to Blackbelt is intended to serve as an accelerated guide to decision support designs. Its structure is designed to enhance the skills in Excel of those who have never used it for anything but possibly storing phone numbers, enabling them to reach a level of mastery that will allow them to develop user interfaces and automated applications. To accomplish this, the major theme of the text is 'the integration of the basic'; as a result readers will be able to develop decision support tools that are at once highly intuitive from a working- components perspective but also highly significant from the perspective of practical use and distribution. Applications integration discussed includes the use of MS MapPoint, XLStat and RISKOptimizer, as well as how to leverage Excel's iteration mode, web queries, visual basic code, and interface development. There are ample examples throughout the text.