Excel BasicsIn our first lesson, you'll develop a solid understanding of the Excel interface. You'll become fluent in the secret language spoken only by Excel users, you'll discover the best way to correct just about any mistake you might make in Excel, and you'll find yourself gliding effortlessly from cell to cell, leaving behind expertly written labels, numbers, and formulas.
Creating a WorksheetIn this lesson, you'll learn five simple steps you should always follow to ensure that your worksheets are always well-planned, well-constructed, and beautifully formatted.
Time-SaversOur third lesson will teach you the tricks of the Excel masters: a wide variety of useful shortcuts guaranteed to save you time, energy, and frustration. We'll also cover the art of file management in this lesson, so you'll have no trouble saving, retrieving, printing, and emailing your worksheets, or copying, renaming, and even deleting files. By the time you finish this lesson, you'll really start to feel like an Excel pro.
Relative & Absolute ReferencesDo you know the difference between a relative reference, an absolute reference, and a circular reference? You will after this lesson. Today, we focus on writing sophisticated formulas that can help ease us through some rather sticky scenarios.
3-Dimensional WorkbooksWith enough practice, most Excel users quickly become adept at organizing their worksheets across two dimensions: rows and columns. But only a select few will learn how to take their worksheets into the third dimension. Today, you will join that exclusive group. Prepare to have your socks knocked off as you gain hands-on experience in the construction of three-dimensional workbooks.
Sorting and SubtotalingNo Excel course would be complete without a discussion of Excel's amazing data-crunching capabilities. Today, you'll not only learn how to build a database in Excel, you'll also learn how to subtotal, sort, and filter.
The Chart WizardIn this lesson and the next, we'll explore the exciting world of charts. You'll build your first graph today, and you'll learn how easy it is to adjust the chart type, labels, titles, colors, and many other aspects of your chart.
Advanced Graphing TechniquesToday, we'll dig deep into Excel's charting capabilities. You'll explore everything from bar charts and line charts to more prosaic graphs like the pie chart, the bubble chart, and 3-D charts. You'll find out how to personalize your charts with photographs, text labels, and drawings, and you'll discover the best ways to print or otherwise display the truly impressive charts that you'll be creating.
The Function WizardExcel includes many powerful functions that can automatically perform some very complicated tasks for you. In today's lesson, you'll learn some very interesting ways to put these functions to work for you. You'll find out how to ask Excel to magically derive averages, modes, maximums, minimums, and other useful statistics from nothing more than a column or two of numbers.
Financial FunctionsWe'll continue our exploration of Excel functions with an in-depth look at Excel's handy financial functions today. By the time this lesson is over, you'll be able to figure out how much money you'll have when you retire, when your kids reach college, or just before your next vacation. You'll be able to calculate the monthly payment on just about any type of loan, and you'll know how to figure out how long it will take to pay off your credit cards. You'll even create an amortization table of your very own, just like the one lenders use to track a loan's payoff amount over time.
Worksheet AutomationStudents often rank this lesson as one of their favorites. Today, you'll find out how to automate just about any task you find tedious or time-consuming. You'll discover how to move your most frequently used commands from their present, obscure locations to a much more convenient place: the toolbar that's always perched at the very top of your screen. You'll also learn how macros can be used to reduce just about any complex task to a single keystroke.
Decision-Making I think you'll be intrigued by our final lesson, in which you'll teach Excel not only how to make decisions, but also how to act upon those decisions. We'll use a special function in Excel that allows it to make comparisons and use that comparison as the basis for important decisions.