MS Excel for Beginners

The course is structured as an introduction to Excel for the beginner user covering some intermediary topics as well such as: working with tables, creating charts, use of functions and formulae.

See also the Excel advanced course page

Course details

Level: Beginner/Intermediate
Duration: 4 days
Requirements for pass: minimum attendance - 3 days
When the course is offered: see the list of courses for the current semester and/or the InfoSys

Course outline

Day 1

• Familiarization with the Excel workspace. Workbooks and worksheets - copy paste and move data/sheets (from the internet, within the same book and in different ones)
• Text editing , column and row fitting. Data, text and dates
  • freeze, hide and split columns/rows (the Window menu)
  • auto complete, auto fill and auto correct
  • printing view, centering, format painter
• Formatting:
  • cell merging, alignment, wrap, orientation
  • naming cells and adding comments
  • conditional formatting

Day 2

• Data management. Basic formulas
  • relative addressing
  • sorting data
  • data validation
• Auditing tools
  • tracing precedents
  • tracing dependents
  • error tracer
• Sorting the data

Day 3

• Creating charts
  • data tables
  • chart formatting (style, title, value axis, appearance, etc.)
  • importing in word (charts and data) as links

Day 4

• Data analysis:
  • data tables (one variable and multi-variable)
  • goal seek

• Functions and formulae:
  • filter data
  • calculating average, sum, product, sumproduct, median, minimum, maximum, count, mode
  • lookup and IF functions

Useful online resources (grouped by category)

Pivot table links:
http://lacher.com/toc/tutpiv.htm

Online Excel resources/tutorials:
http://www.baycongroup.com/el0.htm
http://www.mrexcel.com/articles.shtml
http://math.about.com/od/excel/
http://www.fgcu.edu/support/office2000/excel/

Functions:
http://www.bettersolutions.com/excel.htm
http://www.meadinkent.co.uk/excel.htm

Other resources/tips:
http://www.pdfconverter.com/resources/articles/Excel2007tutorial/

NOTE: all links open in new windows.