Rewind

[Clueless401]

Rewind to the past when you had little to no knowledge of using Excel.....What would you have yourself do if you could tell the younger you some steps to learn Excel fast, coming into it with no knowledge or experience.

 

[JLGWhiz]

I read the books and learned to use the Help files! But nowadays, you have to buy the books seperately and without the books, using the help file is a struggle for beginners. So join the forums and ask questions. Buy the books if you can afford them.

 

[CA_Punit]

Hey,
I am also a newbie here but i can say with 3-4 month of experience that practice will make you perfect and MrExcel is the best place to practice.

If you want to learn excel, what i did was

Firstly i watched all the videos of Ctrl shift and Enter from Youtube channel of Mike Girvin i.e. Excelisfun.
Secondly Try to read old post of our Excel Legends like Mr Aladin, Eric, Peter_Sss on regular basis

and Practice Practice and Practice...

 

[Clueless401]

I read the books and learned to use the Help files! But nowadays, you have to buy the books seperately and without the books, using the help file is a struggle for beginners. So join the forums and ask questions. Buy the books if you can afford them.

i just bought a hard copy of Ctrl+Shift+Enter by Mike Girvin, is that one good? for beginner

 

[jasonb75]

Rewind to the past when you had little to no knowledge of using Excel.....What would you have yourself do

Start from the beginning and don't skip the basics!

From time to time I still find ridiculously simple things that I should know but don't, things that would probably be covered on the most basic course

 

[JLGWhiz]

i just bought a hard copy of Ctrl+Shift+Enter by Mike Girvin, is that one good? for beginner

All the books are good...for what they were written for. But some are better than others for beginners. If you are focused on Excel and using formulas, then John Walkenbach has a good book for that, he also has a couple of books on vba which are useful if you want to try that. But @CA_Punit nailed it with the practice thing. Get a project like a personal budget, or bank balance or anything where you get regular data input from other sources and start building a spreadsheet for a database. As you progress, you can learn to use formulas to manipulate data and if you really get into it, you can start using vba macros, which you can record. If you learn to record usable macros, you can then learn to edit those macros and make them lean and efficient by eliminating the Select and Activate methods that the recorder uses to track manual input. The internet is loaded with tutorials on Excel, VBA and VBS all of which you can consult from time to time. You will learn the key sites like Chip Pearson's old site, Jon Peltier, Barbara Daiglish's Contextures and a few others where the pros share their knowledge about Excel and coding.

 

[jasonb75]

Also, if you're using the forum as a learning tool, remember there is no such thing as a stupid question, although there are lazy questions and stupid answers.

Even the gurus had to start somewhere, I remember Mike Girvin asking a few questions when I first joined the forum.