Intermediate Microsoft Excel 2007

About This Course

Master advanced features of Microsoft Excel 2007, including charting and PivotTables, and discover how this powerful MS Office program can boost your productivity. In this practical, hands-on course, you'll learn how to create informative and eye-catching charts, as well as how to harness the power of Excel 2007's filtering techniques.

You'll see how Excel 2007 can give you further insight into your valuable data. And by learning how to create macros that eliminate repetitive tasks, you'll earn your coworkers admiration and gratitude. With your macro knowledge, you'll be able to manipulate data with the push of a button.

You'll also discover how to use Goal Seek and Solver and apply them to real-world problems. And you'll set yourself apart from the casual Excel user by learning how to use Excel's VLOOKUP, INDEX & MATCH, and other time-saving functions.

So get ready for six fun, action-packed weeks that will take your Excel skills to the next level!

About The Instructor

This course includes a knowledgeable and caring instructor who will guide you through your lessons, facilitate discussions, and answer your questions. The instructor for this course will be Chad Wambolt.

Chad Wambolt is a graduate of Boise State University, where he obtained his bachelor's degree in accounting. He has spent his entire professional career in the finance field, working for both privately and publicly held companies with sales ranging from $500 million to $3 billion. Through the course of his career, Chad has become an expert user of Microsoft Excel. His knowledge of Excel's capabilities has helped organizations streamline processes and save countless hours of labor. Chad has taught Excel to students of varying skill levels since 1997.

Syllabus

A new section of each course starts monthly. If enrolling in a series of two or more courses, please be sure to space the start date for each course at least two months apart.

Week 1

Wednesday - Lesson 01

In our first lesson, you'll discover why Excel 2007 is such a powerful and user-friendly charting tool. To you, a workbook's numbers might tell an interesting story. But to others, that story might not be quite so obvious—they might just see plain old numbers. So today, you'll find out how to choose the right chart for telling your story, and then how to create, format, and edit your chart to help others clearly visualize that story.

Friday - Lesson 02

There are so many great charting features and enhancements in Excel 2007, there's no way we could cover all of them in a single lesson. So today, we'll continue exploring Excel's charting options—this time looking at the lesser-known options that are available to you. Even though they aren't well known, these options can add tremendous value to your worksheets in the right situations. We'll walk through a few of them step-by-step so you'll see the value for yourself.

Week 2

Wednesday - Lesson 03

Working with data in Excel can be quite easy—and sometimes even fun—when you know about the extra tools that are available once you have your data arranged in a table format. One of these great tools is the Auto Filter command. In today's lesson, you'll learn how to use Auto Filter to limit your table information to just the records you want. Not only does Auto Filter allow for finding exact matches, but it can also filter and sort based on cell shading or font color. How great is that?

Friday - Lesson 04

Normally, you'll use your Excel workbooks as a place to enter formulas and get answers. But what if the formula isn't returning the answer you want? If you know what you want but you just don't know what formula will get you there, then Excel's Goal Seek is exactly what you need. This tool will help you avoid the trial-and-error approach that most Excel users go through to get to the right answer. In this lesson, we'll walk through multiple examples together, exploring several ways to apply this great feature.

Week 3

Wednesday - Lesson 05

Today, you'll learn how to use one of the best features of Excel: the PivotTable. If you've heard about PivotTables before, then you know what I mean. There's no greater what-if analysis tool to summarize, reorganize, and report data. When we practice creating a PivotTable, you'll discover how "pivoting" your data helps you gain valuable insights by seeing the same information from a different perspective. This is a lesson you won't want to miss!

Friday - Lesson 06

Just like charting, Excel's PivotTables are too big a topic to fit into one lesson. So today, we'll take PivotTables to the next level by taking a tour through some of Excel's more advanced techniques. You'll learn how quick and easy it is to group your data to give your PivotTable even more power. Then you'll find out how a PivotTable can serve as your source and inspiration for some really nice charts, specifically, the PivotChart.

Week 4

Wednesday - Lesson 07

Have you ever worked with a financial model in Excel and wondered how you could speculate different outcomes by changing different input amounts? The Excel Solver can do just that. In this lesson, you'll learn how to use Solver to solve a complex problem based on the criteria and constraints we provide it. If you liked the Goal Seek lesson, then this Solver lesson is going to knock your socks off.

Friday - Lesson 08

Back by popular demand, it's Solver! Today, we'll continue with our topic from the prior lesson, but this time, we'll throw in a little bit of a wrinkle. Instead of me guiding you step-by-step through a practical, hands-on experience with the Solver, I'm only going to guide you to a point because I want to help you master a tool that's as complex as it is powerful. By the end of this lesson, and mostly on your own, you'll have successfully mastered using Solver!

Week 5

Wednesday - Lesson 09

Today's topic is a student (and instructor) favorite. In this lesson, you'll find out how to use macros to turn boring, repetitive, time-consuming tasks into automated Excel functions. Tired of doing the same formatting on the same report month after month? Here's your chance to see how to record a macro that performs that time-consuming task in seconds with just one swift click of a button! How will you spend all the extra time that this lesson will save you?

Friday - Lesson 10

If you've used Excel for a while, you know there are hundreds of functions at your disposal. We're going to spend the last three lessons of this course going over exactly how and why you'd use them. We'll start today by going through a quick overview of all the categories of functions and the different methods you can use to create them. Then, later in the lesson, we'll ease into creating various functions using some from the Text category.

Week 6

Wednesday - Lesson 11

Next to learning how to create macros, most students want to learn as much as they can about Excel functions. In today's lesson, we'll dig a little deeper into using some of the slightly more complex functions that you'll find in the Math & Trig category. Specifically, we'll look at two of my favorites, the SUMIF and COUNTIF functions, and discuss how to use one of Excel 2007's new functions, SUMIFS. If one of your objectives in taking this course is to learn more about functions, you're in for a treat!

Friday - Lesson 12

Since functions are such an important and integral part of using Excel, we'll spend our final lesson going over a few more of them. Today, you're going to learn how to use the extremely popular VLOOKUP function. If you're already accustomed to using VLOOKUP, don't feel short changed, because we're going to add to the complexity. We're going to use the INDEX and MATCH functions to do something just short of amazing. This is another lesson you won't want to miss!

Requirements

Microsoft Windows 8, Microsoft Windows 7, Vista, or XP, Microsoft Excel 2007 or Microsoft Excel Home and Student 2007 or Microsoft Office 2007 (the Home and Student Edition or Standard Edition of Microsoft Office 2007 are all acceptable). Please be sure to install the software on your computer before the course begins; Internet access, e-mail, the Microsoft Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox Web browser, and the Adobe Flash and PDF plug-ins (two free and simple downloads you obtain at http://www.adobe.com/downloads by clicking Get Adobe Flash Player and Get Adobe Reader). This course is not suitable for Macintosh users, nor for users of older versions of Microsoft Excel.

Note: "Starter Version" and "Web App" versions of Microsoft Excel 2010 will not work with the full version of Excel taught in this course.