People Banner
DCU People
Picture which shows three of the learning spotlight documents fanned out and has the word 'spotlight' beside them

Learning Spotlight | Microsoft Excel

WHY LEARN MICROSOFT EXCEL?

Excel isn’t just about tables. It’s useful in your personal and professional life, enabling you to perform a wide variety of activities, including statistics, finance, data management, forecasting, analysis, tracking and billing. Excel helps you get stuff done more faster and more efficiently!

KEY TERMS

Cell: A basic building block of a worksheet. A piece of data must be entered into a cell.

Function: predefined formulas that help to simplify more complex formulas.

Formula: an equations that can perform on values in a range of cell, such as addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division

Worksheet: a collection of cells organised into columns and rows. An Excel file can be made up of multiple worksheets.

GET STARTED

Video (2 mins): A quick overview of what exactly Excel is and what it’s used for.

Article: How to Master Excel in 11 Steps (12 mins): A solid runthrough of key tasks and actions to get you up and running.

Course (40 mins): Get the basics of Excel in less than an hour with Getting Started with Excel.

Course (48 mins): Get fast answers to common Excel questions in Excel Quick Tips.

Google Workspace Learning Center: Overview: Differences between Sheets and Excel

Course (2 hours): This course demystifies formulas and functions sharing bite-sized tips designed to help you work more efficiently. Excel Formulas and Functions Quick Tips.

DIG DEEPER

Course (16 mins): A pivot table is an incredibly useful feature that lets you summarise large amounts of data. Quickly learn how in Excel PivotTable Quick Tips.

Course (7 mins): VLOOKUP— and XLOOKUP, the newer version for 365 – are among Excel’s most powerful functions. Master them with a few simple steps in VLOOKUP and XLOOKUP for Beginners.

FOLLOW-ON ACTIVITY

Use Excel as a Project Tracker:

  1. Create an Excel sheet for a personal or professional project and save your XLS.
  2. Insert columns for the name of the project, duration, the task, progress, budget versus actual spending and any other key information.
  3. Add formulae to add columns and show how much time remains to complete a task, what's over budget and other details you want to track.