Mac Excel Tutorial

[kixkat824]

I am a lab assistant in a biology/environmental science department on my campus. A large part of this has me helping beginning students with basic scientific reporting, data gathering, analysis, etc.
I can easily do non-complicated Excel functions and uses and teach them to the students if they have a PC. But I've run into a huge problem when they have a Mac, as I have never owned a Mac and honestly don't know what to do with them. None of the professors are super familiar with Macs and Excel data/graphing, as being a science major and owning a Mac tends to be discouraged due to these immediate problems.

Does anyone know of any good tutorials or websites that I can use/send to these students when we have problems with basic data functions (like averaging, stdev, and other really simple things)? I would appreciate anyone's help.

 

[cyrilbrd]

Hi,

Excel being mostly the same on a PC and on a mac, expect for the "eye candy", formula such as average, median, stdev ect will work just the same on both platforms.

What I mean to say is that the syntax and the formulation do not change from a PC to a mac.

Is this clearing things up?

 

[kixkat824]

Formulas and everything I'm fine with, the problem occurs when it comes to graphing, mostly, as that's pretty much all they'll be doing. I can't find the right toolbars/buttons and they have no idea what they're doing, so they can't even tell me where anything is. Is it just their settings that they need to change? Do I need to go and find a way to enable the toolbars? Or is there something special with Macs that I need to do?

 

[cyrilbrd]

Would you know what version of Excel they have installed on their mac?

 

[kixkat824]

Hmm, that's a good question. I'm assuming they have the newest version of Excel, as they just bought their laptops in most cases.

 

[cyrilbrd]

Would you like a sort of "How-to" for creation of graph for excel2011?

 

[kixkat824]

Is it really that different than 2007? All of our campus computers have 2011 and I've never had a problem on the PCs. It's just been with a couple Macs in class that I simply cannot find certain graphing functions like error bars.

 

[cyrilbrd]

Well 2011 is different from 2008 which in turn was different from 2004 (no 2007 on mac).
the ribbon in 2011 is as follows: Home / Layout / Tables / Charts / SmartArt / Formulas / Data / Review / Developer (if activated that is)
Whenever you selected your raw data, and went to the "Charts" tab displayed in the ribbon, your first set of icons would be the chart Type then Insert Sparklines followed by Data, Chart Quick Layout and Chart style.
Choose a chart type (Column per se) and two more tabs will appear in the ribbon next to Chart, those are "Chart Layout" and "Format".
Click on Chart Layout and you'll find Current Selection, Format Selection, Chart Title, Axis Title, Legend, Data Labels, Data Table, Axes, Gridlines, Trendline, Lines, Up/Down Bars and Error Bars...

Is this what you needed?

 

[kixkat824]

2008, 2007, I totally know what year I entered college....haha.

Perhaps the ribbon wasn't activated yet? I don't have a Mac by me (summer break) but once I'm back I'll experiment around with it.
I do know that when we were having problems it was really just a not being able to find any buttons, on top of them not knowing anything about Excel.