In the competitive world of textbooks, different is definitely bad. Authors and publishers, like politicians, stay in the safe middle. Straying too far from the herd is almost a sure way to fail. Fear is strong, but it apparently can be overcome – after all, you are reading a spectacularly unconventional textbook.

The most obvious difference between this book and the usual fare is the use of Microsoft Excel to teach economic theory. This enables students to acquire a great deal of sophisticated, advanced Excel skills while learning economics. No other book does this.

The use of Excel drives other differences. Excel requires concrete, numerical problems instead of the abstract functions and graphs used by other books. Excel's Solver makes possible presentation of numerical methods for solving optimization problems and equilibrium models. No other book does this.

Because numerical solutions are readily available, this book is able to present and explain analytical methods that have been pushed to appendixes or completely ignored in mainstream texts. Problems are solved twice – once with Excel and once with equations, algebra, and, when needed, calculus. No other book does this.

Finally, this book is organized differently. It explicitly repeats a single central methodology, the economic approach, so students learn how economists think and how to think like an economist. Other books try to do this, but none brings the economic way of thinking explicitly to the surface, repeating the message in every application.