# Organizing an excel training syllabus/ outline for college students



## Liboyii (Sep 25, 2012)

Greetings!

I am currently a college student in the Philippines studying accounting and business. I've recently realized that we don't really have much training on excel beyond its basic functions such as using simple arithmetic formulas (addition, averages, etc). Personally, I believe that it would be a great help to students like me to have a solid foundation on excel that we can use to our advantage when we start working. Having said that, I want to try and organize an extracurricular class to offer excel training for interested classmates of mine. However, since I'm not really an expert on excel myself, I don't know where to start! Which is why I am asking for help with organizing an excel training outline that we can follow to give us a solid foundation on the program. The following are information which I hope will be useful:

Goals of the program (very rough! please feel free to comment on more concrete goals if you have some in mind):

Be able to use excel with just mostly using the keyboard and rely less on the mouse.
Know basic VBA
Be able to organize a fairly large amount of data in excel efficiently, and effectively
*sorry for the vague goals. Again, my knowledge in excel is very limited so I'm having a hard time grasping solid goals for my current level. Please feel free to comment and suggest on better, more specific goals.

Target time frame: 1 semester (roughly 6 months)

Target audience:
College students
Technologically adept enough for basic computer skills (word, internet, etc)

Knowledge of Excel (or audience and me)

Can use simple formulas (=sum, =average)
Vaguely remembers pivot tables and filters
Absolutely no knowledge on VBA/macros

Thank you so much for your time! I hope that you guys can point me to the right direction!


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## smkyle (Sep 25, 2012)

Here are some of the first things that I learned that I have found very useful:

different types of pastes. For example Paste Values, Paste Links, Paste Formulas
The record macro button. For example you could have people create a macro that turns a cell Red and Bold.
Filters!
Absolute References $A$1, $A1, A$1, A1
Simple array formulas such as Transpose
Simple formatting options General/Number/Text/Date
Basic Pivot table

I think that is a good start. I'll let others chime in


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## xenou (Sep 25, 2012)

Hard to say but off the top of my head (an incomplete list):

SumProduct() for conditional summing -- probably obsolete now with SUMIFS() as an alternative in Excel 2007+
VLOOKUP
INDEX(MATCH())
Pivot Tables
Advanced Filtering
Record Macros
Defined Names
Spreadsheet Design (input cells, separation of data and presentation of data, documentation, check figures, query tables)
XML
Dates in Excel
Formatting/Custom Formatting
Ribbon Customization
Text Imports
Financial Functions
Statistical Functions

You could do worse than just peruse Contextures Excel Tips, Excel Tutorials and Excel Examples -- a lot is covered there.


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## Liboyii (Sep 27, 2012)

Awesome! thanks so much for the replies! I'll try to formulate an outline and then upload it here for you guys to check out


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## xenou (Sep 27, 2012)

Adding to my list (in no particular order):

Using Conditional Formats
Installing/Using Addins
Enabling or disabling macros (using trusted locations)
Adding items to the Quick Access Toolbar (QAT)
Charting (probably a big topic of itself)

Tips:
Formula Auditing
File Format Basics
Attaching a workbook to an email
Useful keyboard shortcuts
Find/Replace tips
Goto Dialog tricks (locate blanks, errors, constants, formulas)
Using the Format Painter


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