Excel presentation

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.