Excel Beginners

Navigating Excel: Step 1 To Mastering Spreadsheets

Starting at the beginning and building a solid foundation

About this Guide

This guide is meant to help users get a grasp for what Excel is, what is can be useful for, and how to navigate its various menus and tools.

Not all the tools which exist in Excel will be covered, and none will be covered to their fullest potential. Each tool whose explanation takes more than a few lines to write out can most likely be used for so many different situations that you could make an independent guide for each one and still miss things which it can help accomplish!

What this guide will do is highlight all the tools which have common and prevalent use cases and gives users the ability to begin to apply them to their daily work within Excel. While some tools may take a day to master, others will take a day to gain a simple understanding of, this is normal and to be expected.

Once you have discovered a tool or functionality which interests you (warning: there may be many of them!) it is important to apply them while they are fresh in your memory. I would recommend taking notes or tagging the tools which pique your interest and slowly begin to apply them into processes which already exist. Moving from one to another as you begin to feel comfortable using them. It is also easier to modifying an existing workflow than it is to create a new workflow to accommodate a specific tool, this can give you a good comparison for how the tool reacts when put in a situation you are comfortable with.

While this guide is labelled as a tool for beginners, there is a strong chance even an experienced Excel user will learn something new by reading this! It is rare that we take the time to explore every button, tab, or property of a program and there is always something new to be learned.

Goodluck, and happy learning!

- Matthew Di Minno