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Introduction to the Tutorial: Rediscovering Excel

Nothing has really changed in Excel since 1997 except for some cosmetic transformations and WEB related functionalities that are weak at best. What has changed radically is the computer on your desk. Since the arrival of Excel (20 years ago) the computer capacity and its memory have increased 1,000 folds and this personal computer of yours is now part of a network within your company and a network connecting you to the world. This is why Excel has become so more powerful and useful. You can now do things with Excel that were impossible even 5 years ago.

So here is a tutorial to rediscover Excel including some old functions and functionalities that were put on the shelves years ago because the personal computer couldn't handle them or because the data was not available.

Excel is a magnificent tool to analyse data and then develop reports to share the results of your analyses. So there are three sections on this website:  analysing data with Excel (13 lessons),  reporting with Excel (6 lessons) and  Excel functions and formulas (18 lessons). An appendix presenting briefly all the functions of Microsoft Excel completes the website.

Before learning anything about functions and formulas there are two sections that offer you tips to work faster and better, tools to gather external data, powerful analysing tools within Excel and tools that will help you design great reports whatever the audience.

Section 1: Analysing Data with Excel

On top of having more powerful computers there has been an increase in access to data. There are enormous central databases in all companies. There are database in accounting programs, manufacturing programs, sales programs and all kinds of other programs. The down side of all these programs are their analysis and reporting segments. That is why Excel becomes so important. Nowadays you can get data from of all these programs and databases in Excel format or CSV and TXT format. All this data can be easily imported in Excel to do your thing which is analyse and report to support the decision making processes that will allow corporations to save or make more money.

For the most part you don't need functions and formulas to analyse data in Excel. With the calculator, the comparative analysis tools and the most important database functionalities you can clean you databases and analyse the data dynamically. Once you have identified problems that need to be monitored you develop an automated report (using functions) and you follow the situation.

Section 2: Reporting with Excel

In the section on reporting with Excel you will discover that Excel is the best, the cheapest the most user friendly reporting application. When you adopt the "Data Sheet" approach using the SUMPRODUCT function you can automate all your reports and work much less with much better results. Using the camera you can even show many reports and charts on the same sheet. With hyperlinks and imagemap yo can get rid of Power Point and yet develop great presentations. There are also tools to highlight things in your reports (conditional formatting) and the very useful text boxes to overcome the limits of the grid when developing forms, invoices, and all other reports with titles and notes. You will also discover how to develop drop-down lists in Excel. These DDLists are easy to develop, very few users know about them but they become an essential tool in developing automated dynamic reports and insuring the quality of the data entered in forms or databases.

Section 3: Functions and Formulas in Excel

After a lesson of very useful and general tips on functions and formulas there are the signs, the ISERROR function and  the absolute and relative references. These preliminaries are essential to develop superior skills with Excel functions and formulas.

Then the few most important functions have their own lesson: SUBTOTAL, SUMPRODUCT and INDEX/MATCH.

Next discover the other 40 interesting functions by category from "Date & Time" to Text.

To complete this adventure a lesson on array formulas and a presentation of the obsolete functions.

Appendix: All the functions in Excel

There are 328 of them in 8 different categories. In this appendix you will find all of them with a brief description of what they do. For the 40 most important ones section 3 of this website offers you more details and formulas.