In an effort to spread knowledge throughout the newsroom, those of us who are not reporters have been asked to give workshops to share some of our skills. The thing I chose to share this first time was Microsoft Excel.

As I pitched it, it was Excel 101: Starting out with the very basics, and getting as far as we could go in the scheduled half hour.

It seemed to go well. We covered:

• Basic navigation
• Cell References, relative and absolute
• Formulas, values and formatting
• Basic cell calculations
• Excel Formulas (SUM and AVERAGE)

Then we got into a real-world dataset and looked at sorting and filtering and calculations. At the very end I gave a peek at PivotTables just to demonstrate what Excel is capable of.

Here’s an Excel tipsheet (PDF) that I created for an earlier workshop that also covers these basics.