Microsoft Excel is a spreadsheet program that is used incredibly widely. Having a good understanding of how Excel works is a key skill for any office worker today. Spreadsheets let you store and organise data in a grid of rows and columns. It lets you control and process your data by using formulas and functions. In it’s most simple applications, it can be used to summarise data showing totals, averages and also to very quickly produce graphs and charts. However, it is an extremely powerful and flexible tool and is used in a very wide variety of far more complicated applications. It is used for applications as different as producing full financial models for businesses or groups of businesses and statistically analysing scientific data.
Acuity’s Microsoft Excel training courses can take you from being a complete beginner, who has never used Microsoft Excel, all the way through to an advanced user who will then be able to make full use of the program’s capabilities. If you wish, you can then go on to learn to program in VBA (visual basic for applications) which will enable you to further automate tasks by building your own macros.
Led by highly experienced Excel trainers with many years of experience our hands-on courses mean that you will leave with practical experience as well as useful tips and tricks.
We run scheduled Excel training courses in Guildford and London at a number of levels. We usually train on version 2016 which is almost identical to 2010 and 2013.
One-to-one or group bookings can also be arranged on dates to suit you and customised to your specific requirements, you can also specify which version of Excel you would like to be trained on.
We also frequently provide onsite training to companies. This is nationwide and not limited to businesses based in London and the South East. We have trainers based in the Manchester area who are available now for onsite training.
Each course is designed carefully to ensure that we make you a faster and more relaxed Excel user. Given how widely Excel is used in business today we believe that being a comfortable and capable Excel user is a key career skill for everyone.
Whether you are a beginner tackling Excel for the first time, or an advanced user learning how to automate repetitive tasks using VBA, our courses are deliberately very hands-on. We believe that skills are developed through guided practice which reinforces learning and shows you how to apply what they are learning practically. Our exercises are carefully chosen to emphasise the key aspects of each lesson.
Excel’s key strength is that is it so flexible and configurable. However, this presents a challenge to the inexperienced user as this means that it offers large numbers of options, often within nested menus. It is not unusual for a user to know that something is possible within Excel but not be able to find the relevant menu. By encouraging delegates to working independently on Excel we allow them to become familiar with how menus are structured and where different options are accessed.
Our main training centre is in Guildford .
We also running Excel training courses in London.
We are also very happy to provide on site Excel training at your premises.
Excel is used extensively in business. It has obvious uses in finance but is used far more widely to track and manage information. It’s ability to hold, manage, present and summarise information quickly and simply make it ubiquitous. The ability for Excel VBA to be used to build custom function means that it can be used to very quickly automate repetitive functions. A typical example of this would be generating monthly or weekly reports and graphs.
Financial models that are used to forecast business cashflow are often built using Excel spreadsheets that can, on occasion, become very large. It contains a large number of very useful functions which automate the analysis of the output, including IRR, XIRR, NPV and DCF.
Excel is the spreadsheet function contained within the Microsoft Office suite of products. It is available within both Microsoft Office for Windows and also Office for Mac. However it is worth noting that Excel does not offer VBA functionality within Office for Mac 2008. It has been ubiquitous within the office environment since the mid 90’s when it took over from Lotus 1-2-3.
The recent most used versions of Excel are:
Excel 2003:
It was the last version of Excel to not have the ribbon system. It is becoming increasingly rare to see Excel 2003 these days.
This update to Excel (from Excel 2000) introduced new Tables functionality and also allowed information to be saved and modified using the XML data format. This made Excel 2003 far more compatible than previously as it made importing data from other sources far more simple.
Excel 2007:
This version of Excel introduced the ribbon. This was a major change to the appearance of Excel and many users struggled with the changes initially. Other changes that were introduced were making individual spreadsheets larger so that they could contain over a million rows (previously 65,536 rows) and up to 16,384 columns (previously 256). Further changes were also made to the Tables function. These changes made tables far more easily configurable.
Excel 2010:
Excel 2010 was a refinement of Excel 2007. The changes while meaningful were far less radical than the changes between the 2003 and 2007 versions. The key improvement was to security given the increasing use of Excel to distribute malware and viruses. The ability to avoid downloading harmful content but still preview a document using “Protected View’ was the key improvement. Changes were also made to the ribbon functionality to increase it’s flexibility and to pivot tables to make them more user friendly. The number of formulas included within the program was also increased substantially.
Excel 2013:
This version is again more of a refinement and expansion of 2010 than a wholesale change. There are multiple small changes and improvements through the program. Examples of new functionality include Quick Analysis, which creates tables very quickly and simply, and PowerPivot, which is a substantial expansion of the old pivot table functionality. PowerPivot allows very large externally held datasets (often held in Access or SQL databases) to be analysed using Excel. In doing this it moves to being a Business Intelligence (‘BI’).
Delegates interested in Excel training courses are also often interested in:
Further information on Excel can be found at the following websites:
Wikipedia: Excel Article
Microsoft: Excel Homepage
You may find the following articles that we have written on Excel useful as well.
1. Training with a highly experienced Microsoft Excel certified trainer.
2. A full colour A4 Excel course manual for you to take home.
3. Free parking at our site in Guildford.
4. Lunch and plenty of refreshments through out the day.
5. A comfortable, air conditioned training environment.
6. The exercises that you will work on (Where appropriate a USB stick is provided for you to take your training exercises away with you)
