Microsoft Excel Training: Essentials Course

The first session in this course focuses on showing you how to find your way round Excel. It explains how you navigate around the screen and how you access the many functions and tools that Excel contains.

The key topics covered are:

• Starting Excel From the Desktop
• Understanding the Excel Start Screen
• The Excel Workbook Screen
• How Excel Works
• Using the Ribbon
• Showing and Collapsing the Ribbon
• Understanding the Backstage View
• Accessing the Backstage View
• Using Shortcut Menus
• Understanding Dialog Boxes
• Launching Dialog Boxes
• Understanding the Quick Access Toolbar (QAT)
• Adding Commands to the QAT
• Understanding the Status Bar

This session gets you using spreadsheets for the first time, and shows you how to create, input data into and save a workbook. It also shows you how to format the data that you have put into Excel and spell check it for typos.

The key topics covered are:

• Understanding Workbooks
• Using the Blank Workbook Template
• Typing Text
• Typing Numbers
• Typing Dates
• Understanding the Fill Handle
• Typing Formulas
• Easy Formulas
• Saving a New Workbook on Your Computer
• Checking the Spelling
• Making Basic Changes
• Printing a Worksheet
• Safely Closing a Workbook

This session focuses on explaining how to work with the cells in a spreadsheet. It shows you how to select specific areas of a spreadsheet (including areas that aren’t continuous) or to select whole rows or columns.

The key topics covered are:

• Understanding Ranges
• Selecting Non-Contiguous Ranges
• Using Special Selection Techniques
• Selecting Larger Ranges
• Selecting Rows and Columns
• Viewing Range Calculations
• Creating An Input Range

Now that you are comfortable working with the basics in spreadsheets, the course shows you how to work with the data in your spreadsheet. It leads you through editing your data, deleting your cells or the whole spreadsheet and finally the undo function that Excel contains.

The key topics covered are:

• Understanding Data Editing
• Overwriting Cell Contents
• Editing Longer Cells
• Editing Formulas
• Clearing Cells
• Deleting Data
• Using Undo and Redo

Excel allows you to share your workbook with other users on the same network and on OneDrive and have multiple people editing it. Changes are saved when you close your document and you will be able to see other users’ changes when you re-open. With just one working file it disposes of the need to email a spreadsheet between team members and then try and merge the changes and see changes that others have made.

The key topics covered are:

• Sharing Workbooks via the Network
• Sharing Workbooks via OneDrive
• Saving to OneDrive
• Sharing Workbooks
• Opening Shared Workbooks
• Enabling Tracked Changes
• Accepting or Rejecting Changes
• Disabling Tracked Changes
• Adding Worksheet Comments
• Navigating Worksheet Comments
• Editing Worksheet Comments
• Deleting Comments

Excel contains a very useful function called Fill. It allows you to very quickly create a series of entries in a series ( e.g. 1,2,3,4,5 .. 45,46..) just by entering the initial numbers of the series.

The key topics covered are:

• Understanding Filling
• Filling a Series
• Filling a Growth Series
• Filling a Series Backwards
• Filling Using Options
• Creating a Custom Fill List
• Modifying a Custom Fill List
• Deleting a Custom Fill List
• Extracting With Flash Fill
• More Complex Flash Fill Extractions
• Extracting Dates and Numbers

The ability of Excel to manipulate data by using formulas is one of its key properties. This session is a gentle introduction to formulas explaining how they work and introducing some of the simpler, standard formulas that Excel contains.

The key topics covered are:

• Understanding Formulas
• Creating Formulas That Add
• Creating Formulas That Subtract
• Formulas That Multiply and Divide
• Understanding Functions
• Using the SUM Function to Add
• Summing Non-Contiguous Ranges
• Calculating an Average
• Finding a Maximum Value
• Finding a Minimum Value
• What if Formulas
• Common Error Messages

Another key part of working with and understanding formulas in Excel is referencing. Formulas must draw the information that they use from somewhere. Usually this is a cell in the spreadsheet. Ensuring that the formulas always work with the correct pieces of information even when they are cut and pasted is key. This session explains how referencing works and how to ensure that your formulas work with the correct information.

The key topics covered include:

• Absolute Versus Relative Referencing
• Relative Formulas
• Problems With Relative Formulas
• Creating Absolute References
• Creating Mixed References

As you can in other Microsoft Office programs, Excel allows you to format the font, background and other effects of your text very flexibly. This session will show you all of the different possibilities that Excel has to offer.

The key topics covered include:

• Understanding Font Formatting
• Working With Live Preview
• Changing Fonts
• Changing Font Size
• Growing and Shrinking Fonts
• Making Cells Bold
• Italicising Text
• Underlining Text
• Changing Font Colours
• Changing Background Colours
• Using the Format Painter
• Applying Strikethrough
• Subscripting Text
• Superscripting Text

When you are working with a spreadsheet it is very likely that you will work with other types of data than just text. Most likely your spreadsheet will contain numbers, dates, fractions, currency and possibly other items. Excel will allow you to format each of these types of data appropriately so that it is easy to read and obvious to the user what type of data they are looking at.

The key topics covered include:

• Applying Alternate Currencies
• Applying Alternate Date Formats
• Formatting Clock Time
• Formatting Calculated Time

This session focuses on how to apply, remove and format options on cell borders. Borders are a very useful way to help users navigate the information held in a spreadsheet. This session will show you how to use Excel’s functionality to apply them quickly.

The key topics covered include:

• Understanding Borders
• Applying a Border to a Cell
• Applying a Border to a Range
• Applying a Bottom Border
• Applying Top and Bottom Borders
• Removing Borders
• The More Borders Command
• Using the More Borders Command
• Drawing Borders
• Drawing a Border Grid
• Erasing Borders
• Formatting the Drawing Pencil

Each spreadsheet is held within a worksheet. Just as there are a number of options to manipulate and customise the appearance of a cell, there are a number of ways that the appearance of a whole worksheet can be manipulated. We will show you how to make sure that your worksheets are formatted and structured exactly how you would like them to be.

The key topics covered include:

• Understanding Worksheets
• Changing the Worksheet View
• Worksheet Zooming
• Viewing the Formula Bar
• Viewing Worksheet Gridlines
• Viewing the Ruler
• Inserting Cells Into a Worksheet
• Deleting Cells From a Worksheet
• Inserting Columns Into a Worksheet
• Inserting Rows Into a Worksheet
• Deleting Rows and Columns
• More Than One Worksheet
• Worksheet Wisdom

Once you have created your spreadsheet and used it to store and manipulate your data you will want to print it out at some point. This session introduces the basics of printing from Excel.

The key topics covered include:

• Understanding Printing
• Previewing Before You Print
• Selecting a Printer
• Printing a Range
• Printing an Entire Workbook
• Specifying the Number of Copies
• The Print Options

This final session of the course goes into more detail on printing in Excel. It shows you how to control things like margins, the orientation of your page and the background of your printed area.

The key topics covered include:

• Strategies for Printing Worksheets
• Understanding Page Layout
• Using Built in Margins
• Setting Custom Margins
• Changing Margins by Dragging
• Centring on a Page
• Changing Orientation
• Specifying the Paper Size
• Setting the Print Area
• Clearing the Print Area
• Inserting Page Breaks
• Using Page Break Preview
• Removing Page Breaks
• Setting a Background
• Clearing the Background
• Settings Rows as Repeating Print Titles
• Clearing Print Titles
• Printing Gridlines
• Printing Headings
• Scaling to a Percentage
• Fit to a Specific Number of Pages