Training???

[Nine Zero]

Hello All,

I am writing this to hopefully receive some advice. I was recently told at my job that I will be giving some sort of "workshop" to the employees here to teach them basic to some intermediate level of Excel. Now knowing myself and how I am, I will go off into a rampage trying to teach them everything I know and I will confuse the hell out of them. My question is:

-What should be a good "foundation" to teach them first
-What formulas should I focus on more than others
-How in depth should i get into the world of Excel for them to understand

I know that Excel requires a lot of common sense sometimes and unfortunately there are quite a few coworkers here that are missing that. I know for sure I will not even talk about VBA at all to them. So in all i need to know exactly what should I teach them.

This is a food manufacturing company and I will be teach the Accounts Receivable Department ...

 

[philaugust2004]

I'd go back to the person who asked you to find out what the employees hope to do with Excel first. Then you can tailor the training to specific needs

 

[Nine Zero]

I'd go back to the person who asked you to find out what the employees hope to do with Excel first. Then you can tailor the training to specific needs

Thats what I initially wanted to do but each person is on so many different levels and some dont know anything becase they were "trained" to just put a number in this cell and it will do what it needs to do but sometimes things dont work and they freak out. I know i could group them and have them sit with me as different levels of knowledge but there are just so little people and that would be like turning what could be 3 or 4 meetings into 10 ...

 

[philaugust2004]

As it's accounting related I'd focus on data analysis so sum, sumifs etc and lookups ie vlookup, index/match. Maybe pivot tables.
I'm assuming they will be downloading data from an accounts package so ask for a sample and play around with it.
Also get copies of the spreadsheets they are working with and see what the common errors are and why things go wrong.