Master the Basics of Spreadsheets

Welcome to this course on spreadsheets!

Spreadsheets are great at keeping your data organized. Whether it’s your personal budget or your company’s sales, spreadsheets is a tool where you can store, manipulate, share, and analyze data, as well as prepare presentations of data for others.

Get familiar with the course resources

Let me just take a minute to explain what content you have at your disposal in this course to get to grips with spreadsheets.

Each chapter is a page of content, with:

• an introductory video which introduces what you’ll learn and why it’s useful,

• texts and screencasts. You’ll learn how to actually edit and work in a spreadsheet by reading the texts and watching the screencasts.

Find out what you'll learn

This course is made up of 4 parts, each with 3 to 4 chapters.

Part 1: Edit cells in a spreadsheet

First, we’ll look at how you can edit cells in a spreadsheet, including how to enter and copy data and auto-complete cells to save time.

At the end of this part, there will be a quiz of roughly 10 questions to see if you’ve mastered the basics of spreadsheets!

Part 2: Format a spreadsheet

Then, we’ll move on to formatting a spreadsheet. You’ll learn how to choose a particular formatting style for data, such as currencies, dates, etc., as well as how to freeze columns or rows, align and wrap cell contents. We’ll also cover conditional formatting in this part.

At the end of the last chapter, there will be a practical activity where you will have to set up conditional formatting. We’ll give you a spreadsheet to download and work on 😉.

Once you finish this part, there will be a quiz to test your expertise at making a spreadsheet easy to read.

Part 3: Analyze data in a spreadsheet

The third part is about analyzing data. We’ll cover formulas and functions, and practice using two key functions: IF and VLOOKUP. There are so many things you can work out quickly in spreadsheets once you’ve mastered these.  

We’ll end that part with a quiz too.

Part 4: Visualize data in a spreadsheet

Finally, the last part of the course is about data visualization. The end game of using a spreadsheet can be to present numbers to others or convince them of something because of what the data is telling you, for example. We’ll go over pivot tables and charts in this part and end with a quiz.

Compare the vocabulary across different spreadsheets applications

As you can see, there is a lot to cover! Ready to learn about spreadsheets? Great, on with the first chapter!