Basic Excel Skills
Getting Started
When you open Excel, this is how it looks.
There are 5 important areas in the screen.
1. Quick Access Toolbar: This is a place where all the important tools can be placed. When you start Excel for the very first time, it has only 3 icons (Save, Undo, Redo). But you can add any feature of Excel to to Quick Access Toolbar so that you can easily access it from anywhere (hence the name).
2. Ribbon: Ribbon is like an expanded menu. It depicts all the features of Excel in easy to understand form. Since Excel has 1000s of features, they are grouped in to several ribbons. The most important ribbons are – Home, Insert, Formulas, Page Layout & Data.
3. Formula Bar: This is where any calculations or formulas you write will appear. You will understand the relevance of it once you start building formulas.
4. Spreadsheet Grid: This is where all your numbers, data, charts & drawings will go. Each Excel file can contain several sheets. But the spreadsheet grid shows few rows & columns of active spreadsheet. To see more rows or columns you can use the scroll bars to the left or at bottom. If you want to access other sheets, just click on the sheet name (or use the shortcut CTRL+Page Up or CTRL+Page Down).
5. Status bar: This tells us what is going on with Excel at any time. You can tell if Excel is busy calculating a formula, creating a pivot report or recording a macro by just looking at the status bar. The status bar also shows quick summaries of selected cells (count, sum, average, minimum or maximum values). You can change this by right clicking on it and choosing which summaries to show.
Getting Started with Excel – 10 minute video tutorial
Entering & Formatting Data, Numbers & Tables
Resources to learn Data Handling & Formatting
Typing & Formatting Data in Excel
8 tips for formatting your workbooks
Impressing your boss with spreadsheet formatting
Introduction to Excel Tables
Use Tables to handle data better
Calculating Totals & Summaries using Formulas
Resources to learn Excel Formulas
Introduction to Formulas
Introduction to IF formula in Excel
Top 10 formulas for aspiring analysts & managers
15 important formulas for everyone
51 Everyday Excel formulas explained in plain English
Books to learn Excel Formulas
75 Excel Formulas
The VLOOKUP Book
Courses to learn Excel Formulas
Excel Formula Crash Course (60 formulas, 31 lessons)
The VLOOKUP Video Book (VLOOKUP and other important formulas demystified)
Conditional Formatting
Resources to learn Advanced Conditional Formatting
What is conditional formatting
Introduction to Conditional Formatting
5 Tips on CF
Highlighting Duplicates
More
Creating Reports Quickly
Resources on Reports & Charts
Pivot Tables – Quick & easy reporting feature of Excel
Creating a pivot report
How to select correct chart for any situation?
Making a chart in Excel
Using Excel Productively
It is not enough to know various features of Excel. As a beginner, it helps to know how to use Excel productively. This includes knowing important keyboard shortcuts, mouse shortcuts, work-arounds, Excel customizations & how to make everything looks slick.
Resource to use Excel productively
Keyboard Shortcuts
Mouse Shortcuts
Excel Productivity Tips
Making better Excel workbooks
Important shortcuts & productivity tricks
Top 10 things you can do in Excel in 10 minutes
Beyond Basics – Becoming Awesome in Excel
Once you know the basics, chances are you will be asking for more. The reason is simple. Anyone with good Excel skills is always in demand. Your bosses love you because you can get things done easily. Your customers love you becuase you create impressive things. Your colleagues envy you becuase your workbooks are shining and easy to use. And you want more, because you have seen the amazing results of Excel.
This is where learning Excel pays off. I highly recommend you to join my most comprehensive Excel training program – Excel School. It is an entirely online course that can be done at your own pace from the comfort of your home (or office). The course has more than 24 hours of training videos, 50+ downloadable workbooks, in-depth coverage of all the important areas of Excel usage to make you awesome. To date, more than 5,000 people have enrolled in Excel School and became champions at their work.
11 Responses
Ciao Hui,
Collecting Excel tricks under the title “Notable Excel Websites (Non-MVP) Edition” is a brilliant idea…
Thank you in the name of all The FrankensTeam.
On our site there is a box with a picture and text highlighting:
This is a no-MVP site
we think ourselves “bad boys” a bit 🙂
For those who would like to know why our site is a no-MVP site, enough to click on the link:
http://goo.gl/lxDszY
Thank you again!
Thanks a lot
I really enjoyed this (newsletter). I must admit that I rarely read an Excel newsletter (and I subscribe to quite a few) all the way though, but this grabbed my attention and before I realized it, I was engrossed in it. I must also admit that most of this I don’t understand, yet. But, it excites me when I do learn something new in Excel. I can’t wait to see how much of this I can implement into my (constantly-evolving) ‘House Budget’ & ‘Family Medical’ worksheets that I have developed over the past few years! I sure hope to see more of these type of newsletters in the future! Thanks!
Thanks for doing this Hui! I appreciate being included.
I like Tom’s tip a lot. I posted about a tool I wrote to automate this at http://yoursumbuddy.com/tables-edit-query-dialog/
EXCELLENT !
Hui, This post is Superb! More over I have always been a fan of Roberto’s work and have learnt a lot from him.
Here are some of my recent contributions
1. Customising markers in a chart – http://www.goodly.co.in/customize-markers-in-a-chart/
2. Charting Hacks to work faster – http://www.goodly.co.in/5-charting-hacks-to-help-you-work-faster/
3. 7 Date formulas to make life easy – http://www.goodly.co.in/date-formulas-in-excel/
4. Customised scrollbar using VBA – http://www.goodly.co.in/customized-scroll-bar-in-excel/
5. Adding Direct Legends – http://www.goodly.co.in/customized-scroll-bar-in-excel/
Hope everyone enjoys!
I like the Excel Ninja Menus.
1. Select a cell or range then move till the 4-way cross appears. Right-Click and drag the selection to another place in the worksheet then, like a ninja, a menu full of skills and throwing stars pops up allowing me to do all kinds of awesomeness.
2. When you click the fill box on a Date and right click and drag it down, a lot of amazing Date options pop up.
I also brand my Excel to remind myself that I’m awesome. In my personal macro workbook I place the following code.
Private Sub Workbook_Open()
Application.Caption = “SuperKrishna’s Awesomeness”
End Sub
My favorite tip goes along with #17. If you try to copy subtotaled data (and in earlier Excel versions filtered data),when you paste it all the data displays instead of just the summarized data.
To get around this, select your summarized data, click on Find and Select tab and then select Go to Special. Click Visible cells Only and click OK. Now paste and you will see that only the summarized data has been copied.
You can also go CTRL+G and then click the Special icon at the bottom of the dialog box.
What a great idea, Chandoo! I’d love to be included in your next edition:) Perhaps a VBA exclusive version?
@Ryan
I will review this concept about 6 months out from the original post and be sure to keep your site in mind
Hui…
That sounds great, Hui:) I just realized I gave credit to Chandoo for the idea and I should have attributed it to you.
Sorry about that!