[…] and sets up some basic font and color formatting. You should remember commands like textbf from Part 2. The color related commands are provided by the color […]

Actually if you can get your hands on a copy of Office 2004 excel2latex will work. You see, microsoft “upgraded” their more recent version of Office for Mac by removing VB add-in feature.

Thanks for your help, it was just what I needed. I can’t stop using lateX now, I love how easy it is to make a crisp report.
Unfortunately, I’m having trouble inserting Excel things (cell tables and charts), and the only fix I can find (excel2latex) doesn’t work for me. As I’m using OSX and Office for Mac, when I try to open excel2latex, I get the error: The Visual Basic add-in cannot be loaded (Visual Basic add-ins do not work in Office for Mac). I’ve resorted to taking screenshots and including them as images, but it’s not ideal. I guess I could use a virtual machine, but that seems like an unnecessary step.
Any alternate solutions for moving Excel material into a teX document?

@ Alex:

Try this. I haven’t tested it but it looks promising.

Awesome tutorials!
I just downloaded MacTeX and am slugging through the wikibook on LaTeX… I want to use MacTeX to generate lab reports and low-level research papers. The lab report seems feasible if I can combine excel charts and tables efficiently as well as the occasional diagram. Unfortunately, most of my research papers are required to be in MLA format. This means strict guidelines on the header, a funky opening chunk on the side of the first page, etc. This is easy enough to get in Word, but I can find little to no help in LaTeX tutorials on creating MLA format documents. Any help, guidance, or reference would be a wonderful way to make me another convert.

Thanks for the tutorials! They’re very helpful, so please keep writing them!

Thanks for these writeups.

Though most of my LaTex is generated via Multi-Markdown these days, I appreciate these refreshers…

Keep ’em coming…

Nice post. Have you tried The not so short introduction to LaTeX 2e (CTAN)? It’s one of my favorite tutorials.

For those who don’t like indented paragraphs I can recommend the package parskip (put \usepackage{parskip} in your preamble, i.e. before \begin{document}), which separates paragraphs with a blank line instead of indentation.

there’s a small typo: \noident is missing an “n”.
and I suggest you add a remark that when using \tableofcontents, it might be required to recompile 3 times in worst case to get all numberings correct. This is due to the fact that TeX collects the ToC information in a separate file during compile time, and inserts the “old” file when compiling next time. So the separate files might get out of sync, i.e. page numbers, section numbers etc. might not match.
To be absolutely exact you should recompile over again until the .toc file no longer changes.