Print this page Excel for Beginners

Within the "Word-PowerPoint-Excel" trio, Excel is often seen as the least intuitive—with its thousands of rows and columns and countless functions. Its reputation as "accounting software" doesn’t help either! However, once you master the basics of navigation and data entry, Excel proves to be a simple, practical, and powerful tool with enough features to refine any type of project.

You don’t need to be an accountant or financial expert to find Excel useful. In everyday life, creating lists (guests, suppliers, vocabulary words, etc.), drafting a budget, or tracking anything (fitness performance, investment portfolios, school grades) can be done easily and reliably with Excel.

Deliver Method

• Face to face

Course Resources

• You will need to bring along your own laptop
• A "resource textbook" will be distributed at the end of the course to recap the topics covered and skills acquired.

Course Outline

• Introduction: Overview of the interface, basic navigation & selection techniques.
• Project #1: Contact List [Skills: data entry, formatting, sorting & filtering, conditional formatting, print setup].
• Project #2: Travel Itinerary Planner [Additional skills: basic formulas, data validation].
• Project #3: Fitness Performance Tracker [Additional skills: charts, pivot tables].

Note: Excel’s applications are endless! Depending on the group’s level and interests, we can choose other projects (simple financial modeling, order tracking, investment tracking, budgeting, etc.) or delve deeper into a single project to explore new features.

Learning Outcomes (By the end of this course, students will be able to...) 

• Feel comfortable enough in the Excel environment to want to return and practice (this is the main outcome, as practice is key to progress!).
• Distinguish between different types of cell content and their formatting options.
• Create tables, filter data, and use basic functions to save yourself invaluable time.