When you learn Excel, you learn to use one of the most versatile, powerful and indispensable applications in the Microsoft® Office suite of products. Whether you learn Excel for personal use or learn advanced Excel skills for professional purposes, knowing how to get the most out of this feature-rich tool is sure to make you more efficient and successful.
While Excel is best known as a spreadsheet tool, you can learn advanced Excel features, beyond simply arranging data and performing simple mathematical equations. With free advanced Excel training, you can learn Excel well enough to use the software to create charts and graphs, perform complex statistical analyses, and even to automate certain common tasks. It takes time to learn advanced Excel features, but it all starts with understanding the basics.
The effective collection, analysis and presentation of data is critical to success in today’s business world. For that reason, employers value employees who have or can learn advanced Excel skills. Even in positions that are not technical or analytical, employees are now expected to learn Excel basics. If you’re currently looking for a job, learn advanced Excel skills to increase your marketability and make you more desirable to potential employers.
All of Excel’s features are built upon the first thing you see when you open the application – the worksheet. You will learn about the worksheet – or spreadsheet – when you first learn Excel. It allows you to arrange data in a tabular format before you start playing with it.
There are a number of ways to put data into an Excel worksheet. When you first learn Excel, you will simply enter your data manually. It is important to enter the data in a way that Excel understands. Think of the columns in your spreadsheet as categories of data. For example, the columns might be the months of the year, or types of widgets sold. The rows, then, contain numbers or quantities, such as the number of days of sun in the month, or the number of each type of widget sold. When you learn advanced Excel skills, you’ll discover data can also be imported into an Excel worksheet from external sources, such as a database reporting tool or a text file.
Once your worksheet is populated with the necessary data, the real fun begins. When you learn advanced Excel skills, you can start to write formulas that will perform mathematical and logical functions with your data, create charts and graphs, or start analyzing your data in other ways. For almost any task you want to complete, Excel’s intuitive and easy-to-follow wizards will walk you through the process and make you look like a pro. Or, you can find free advanced Excel training online. Either way, you’ll learn advanced Excel well enough to create beautiful, full-color graphical representations of your data that will make it easier to understand – and impress your boss and coworkers!
Charts, graphs and mathematical equations, however, only scratch the surface of Excel’s powerful capabilities. The more you learn advanced Excel skills, the more exciting functions you can use to manage, manipulate and understand your data. When you learn advanced Excel skills it is easy to sort, subtotal, filter and much more.
As you learn advanced Excel skills, you’ll discover one of Excel’s most powerful features is the ability to automate tasks – such as sorting data or creating a chart – with small programs called macros. Excel will simply record and save all the steps you take to complete a given task. When you want to complete that task again, you can simply play the macro, sit back and watch as Excel does all the work for you. If you have data manipulation or analysis tasks that you do every day or every week, free advanced Excel training can teach you how to create macros that will save you hours of time. As you continue to learn advanced Excel skills, you will learn Visual Basic®, the programming language on which Excel is based. Using Visual Basic, you can manually write and edit macros for even more flexibility and power.
With time and free advanced Excel training, you’ll begin to uncover more and more of Excel’s impressive features and realize how important it is to your personal and professional success. It will take time and patience, but once you learn advanced Excel skills, you’ll wonder how you ever got along without them.
