10-Hour Introduction to Microsoft Excel

Instructor: Lindsey Poole

Meeting and working directly with an Excel expert, this introduction to Excel offers students with little or no Excel experience the training that they need to take advantage of some of the most powerful, useful, and common tools in Excel.  Students can choose to meet with the instructor for five two-hour meetings or ten one-hour meetings, depending their availability and the time within which they would like to complete the class.  The course is available for individual students or small groups.  Students should expect to complete short exercises between meetings with the instructor.

About the Instructor:

Lindsey Poole is an accomplished Excel wizard who has been using Excel to solve problems and communicate through detailed graphs since 2007.  When she isn’t teaching Excel, she uses it to manage, analyze and visualize public policy and program data.

Topics and Course Outline:

1. Basic text and spreadsheet formatting, and templates
    

2. Basic accounting functions and cell formatting
    

3. Page layout and printing (including headers and advanced tools)
    

4. Cell reference formulas (e.g. vlookup) and nested formulas
    

5. Date and time formulas, data management and best practices for spreadsheet management
    

6. Sorting, filtering, conditional formatting, and removing duplicates
    

7. Pivot tables
    

8. Graphing—data selection and basic formatting
    

9. Graphing—creating advanced chart types from basic Excel chart types
    

10. Power Pivot and Macros, or other advanced topics based on student interest

Students should expect to learn the topics listed above, including examples of applications for them, as well as how to find the information they need to teach themselves new skills.  Throughout the course, we will also emphasize how organize one’s work in Excel when working in a collaborative environment, such as the workplace, where multiple people may need to understand the data, its analysis, and visualizations.