Power Up with Excel: Foundational Skills for New Users

Download this workbook to practice what is learned in the lessons.

Starting with the basics. Learning how to enter a formula in excel and why you would even want to do such a thing! For those of you that feel comfortable with formulas, might want to go over this lesson quickly. If you are new though, this is a fantastic way to understand formulas.

The invaluable Function Builder. With over 500 functions, there's no way to learn them all, and really, who would want to?  Learning to use the function builder will help you find and understand how to use any excel functions. Its basically a big wizard, that can run on any Excel function.

It's my belief that NOTHING should be absolute, except certain cell references of course! Absolute (and relative) referencing are foundational concepts to understand. Lucky for you, this lesson will teach you all about the differences AND you have a great exercise to work along with to make it all make sense.

Ronnie, Bobby, Ricky and Mike, is that what I should name my references? Um not really, but, being able to properly utilize named ranges can make your spreadsheets more efficient and easier to maintain down the road.

Not to be confused with the IF function itself (next section), the IF an IFS functions are a 'family' of aggregation functions (like CountIF, or SumIFS) that are fantastic tools for building ongoing reports.

Download this workbook to practice what is learned in the lessons.

After this lesson, you will be familiar with many of Excel's function that are used in parsing and manipulating text. separating text, combining text, changing the case (upper and lower), finding text within text and many more.

This lesson will teach you the Excel tool to separate text in one column to several (or many)

Works with both fixed width text and delimited.

This Excel tool enables you to get a distinct list of items from a column or a table of data. Can be really useful if you have a table of order data and want to get a unique list of customers.

Learn the legendary Index Match used to look up values in a table. This pairing has been around for many years and still hold up today!

Have you purchased a car or a home? 

Financed it and just wasn't sure if you were getting ripped off or not?

The payment function will make that feeling go away. Like forever.

With the payment function (PMT) you just plug in the price, length of loan and the interest rate and like a wizard Excel will tell you what the payment will be! One of my favorites for sure.

The payment function is great for calculating the payment if you know the price, term and rate, but what if you know what your maximum payment can be and want to calculate how much you can afford?

It's goal seek to the rescue!

Goal seek lets you work a formula, any formula 'backwards'.

So if you know the interest rate and the length of the loan, you can plug your payment into goal seek and it will work the PMT function backwards to tell you what you can afford!!

Wouldn't that be awesome to walk into a dealership and know automatically what you can afford?

This lesson introduces you to PivotTables, explaining what they are and why they're essential for data analysis.

In this lesson you will learn how to build a PivotTable from scratch.

In this lesson, you'll discover how to update the Value Field Settings, enabling you to change both the aggregation and formatting of your data for more precise and effective analysis.

In this lesson, you'll discover how to refresh your PivotTable with the latest data and seamlessly incorporate new information as it becomes available.

Here, you'll learn how to add and customize subtotals and grand totals in a PivotTable, enhancing your data analysis and presentation.

Here, you'll learn how to add multiple data points to a PivotTable, enhancing your analysis and providing deeper insights.

In this lesson, we'll explore slicers and timelines—powerful tools that add interactivity and to your PivotTables.

In this lesson, you'll learn how to apply conditional formatting to your PivotTables, enhancing the visibility of your insights and making key information stand out.

In this lesson, we'll explore table calculations, which will add a new dimension to your analysis. You'll learn how to compute metrics such as percent of total, percent of row, and running totals, enhancing your ability to derive meaningful insights from your data.

For those new to charting, this lesson will give you an overview of charting.

You will see several different types of charts and understand when to use each one.

By the end of the lesson, you will have a good understanding of what charts are.

By the end of this lesson you will know multiple ways to create a chart in Excel.

In this lesson, you'll discover quick and impactful techniques to format charts, making sure your insights and trends stand out.

This lesson takes a deep dive into category charts—covering pie, donut, sunburst, and more. By the end, you'll have a solid understanding of how to effectively visualize categorical data using these charts