teaching excel

[homer15]

hey everyone,

my company has asked me to conduct a learning session for users who are unfamiliar with excel. i know excel forwards and backwards, but i'm not sure how to teach it. can anyone offer me any good suggestions for building a short curriculum? it can possibly turn into two separate classes: beginners and intermediate… advanced might also be offered. any help is much appreciated.

[Force Flow]

You could start off with showing standard program operations; saving, opening, etc. , then get into the excel specific operations, such as data sorting, cell boarders, ect. The advanced class could contain the mathamatical functions used for calculating the values of different cells.

[mairving]

High on my list in Excel is how to use the keyboard and not the mouse. Saves a lot of time. Definitely for beginners and maybe Intermediate.

It's hard to say how to build an Excel curriculum without knowing what they will be using it for.

[doctorgonzo]

Yes, I agree that it is hard to say when we don't know what they will be doing. However, I think that you should cover the mathematical formulas early. I have seen so many people just fill in number in Excel (or any spreadsheet) and not use calculated cells. I don't know how they are calculating the values (calculator? by hand?). Showing people that the whole point of a spreadsheet is to have things calculated for them is usually an eye-opener.

[homer15]

to tell you the truth, i'm not too sure what they'll be using it for either... an educated guess would say they'd use it to streamline calculations and eventually get rid of the calculators on their desks...

[homer15]

maybe stuff from mous core certification exams:
http://www.microsoft.com/traincert/mcp/officespecialist/objectives/excel2000.asp

[Iman74]

Determine what they are going to use it for: if at all possible generate a survey for them to fill so you can have an idea what to cover. Try to have enough room for answers and opportunities to go over other topics in Excel.

[mbossman2]

basic curriculum:

opening, closing, saving files
Cut, paste, drag and drop of text
Entry and formatting of text and numbers
Addition
Subtraction
Multiplication
Division
Sum of columns and rows
Fixed values
Linking data from one worksheet to another in the same workbook.

Make sure that you do several exercises for each subject and include skills learned in prior "chapters" in the current chapter.

[setfree]

I just finished a course on Excel for school so if you want I could look back in my book and give you some examples of some of the projects we did.

[homer15]

basic examples of projects would be cool... i was thinking about making a check register. it's simple for everyone to understand, but it covers a lot of complicated stuff. could you e-mail me the examples? pm me if you can and i'll give you my e-mail address.