Excel Courses

dirtychinchilla

dirtychinchilla

dirtychinchilla

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Morning all,

My girlfriend's wanting to do a course in Excel. I could teach her most of what she needs to know, but I'm not a very good teacher and it wasn't terribly successful in the past.

So, has anyone got any recommendations on books or relatively cheap courses (the one she was looking at was 1 day and £250+vat!!).

I can look up books etc, but I've got no real idea if any will be any good.

Thanks :)
 
I think most courses will be about that.

What does she want to learn for? To be honest with excel unless you use the functions often you'll never remember then if you just learn them once and then never use them. It's much better to learn as you go i believe.

Otherwise keep an eye on things like groupon. They sometimes pop up there.
 
The only way to learn excel is by doing, no course is going to teach you meaningful things.

It needs to be real world type of things, get her a good excel textbook. Excel 2010 Formulas by John Walkenbach is what I refer to from time to time.

It's nicely broken down, you could get her to read through the sections and highlight what is most useful in her job role.
 
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A 1 day basic course is going to be VERY basic. Even the intermediate courses I've seen cover pretty simple stuff like formatting cells and basic functions.

As has been said, the best way to learn is to use it. Does her job allow her to pickup other work which would test her skills?
 
Thanks guys, I really appreciate the suggestions.

A one day course doesn't sound like it's going to be that comprehensive, to me. I think you're right, Mr. Nelson; when they say basic it'll be extraordinarily basic, and I think she's probably past that stage and will be wasting her money.

I learnt as I went over the years, but unfortunately she's about to be unemployed, so is looking to do this course to help her find a job, which means that she won't be able to learn as she goes.

I'll pass your suggestions onto her. I really appreciate them, thanks again chaps.
 
I have to say that I've learned most of my excel skills, which aren't massive, basic macros, ODBC connectivity, dynamic ranges, pivot tables and lookups) purely through trial and error and wanting to be able to achieve something - with the help of a book and google and some friends I've always been able to do what I wanted.

If she wants something more formalised, so that she understands the basic functions I guess that could be helpful, but anything other than creating basic charts, adding/copying cells, and formatting data is stuff you just learn through experience.
 
Unfortunately, she doesn't have the opportunity at the moment to learn through experience because she's about to be unemployed. I would advise the same thing to her, though. I've learnt everything through experience. I think that setting some goals would be great, but I'm terrible at that - perhaps we'll be able to find some online.

Thanks for the advice :)
 
She could just "do stuff" on excel to get more familiar, but that's quite dull :p

She can utilise excel to plan a holiday, or an event, or her job hunting :)
 
Yeah I know what it's like "doing stuff", you never get anywhere. I learned a lot of what I know now from working for Skidder, actually. Though thinking back, if I'd known VBA then like I do now, I would have been a lot more efficient.
 
The way I learnt excel was through creating my own scenario's either simple or complex. I wanted to create a diet plan for my girlfriend which took pre-entered data from one sheet and when selected in the chart on the first work sheet would give the rough details of sugar, salt & calories consumed.

Taught me to how to use VLOOKUP's quite extensively & make use of pivot tables as well.

Just 'mess' around with the software trying to achieve certain tasks and she'll learn everything you need, as and when required. I have my bills in a nice fancy spreadsheet from stuff I learnt.
 
Might suggest the same approach they do for teaching at schools and colleges. Normally a made up scenario, i.e. a customer wants this solution (whatever it may be) create something for it.

There's an endless list of things excel can be used for, any ideas what sort of work she's looking into? This might help us give some recommendations on specific things to learn.

I rarely remember formulas and things, but there is stacks of help and tutorials on the web (normally in quite good detail) to help overcome any issues.
 
I use Excel a lot at work and apart from the basic Vlookups, Pickups and SumIfs I use Google for answers.

I did a formula recently that was a Sumif which had two conditions based on drop down selection boxes (which I also created).
It took a bit of reading but is fairly simple.

Google is the easiest way to do it all tbh, I never knew of a CountIf formula till I Google'd it yesterday
 
dirtychinchilla said:
Unfortunately, she doesn't have the opportunity at the moment to learn through experience because she's about to be unemployed. I would advise the same thing to her, though. I've learnt everything through experience. I think that setting some goals would be great, but I'm terrible at that - perhaps we'll be able to find some online.

Thanks for the advice :)
Click to expand...

doesn't make sense - if she's going to be unemployed then she's got more time than ever before to learn

Books by this guy are great for reference:

http://spreadsheetpage.com/
 
Thanks for the link, I'll take a look tomorrow :) and for all the other suggestions, guys. I'll try and create some scenarios for her to work through, as that seems to be key from my experience and yours.

Fortunately, she's taken my advice and isn't going to go on the course. It turns out that some people she works with (though won't be on Monday), have just been on exactly the same course that she was looking at, and it was basically things like add cell a1+a2...!

dowie, she will indeed have time, but it always helps if you're in an environment where your only aim is to learn.
 
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