Excel Beginners

Navigating Excel: Step 1 To Mastering Spreadsheets

A Final Note & Activity

A Final Note

Now that we have covered many of the most common tools (as well as many underrated tools which even skilled Excel users have failed to learn about!), you are well equipped to continue your own explorations of Excel.

Using this as a starting point, continue to explore and test new things! Revisit old work, reports, tools, or templates which you have used and see if you can apply the tools you have seen here. If you do not have any documents to reflect on, read until the end where there is an activity that will allow you to practice the implementation of tools from a variety of tabs!

Often times you will find that the documents you have used could be more appealing, could have benefitted from things like better alignment in cells, borders or table formatting for information, a chart or visual representation of the topics being discussed, easier navigation through long bouts of information, protections to avoid information accidentally being changed before a presentation, multitasking through different areas of your document, or even something as simple as having used a font that would have been more legible when shown from a distance. Look for the things which you would have liked to have seen done differently and explore how to do them! There is always a way, sometimes it just requires a little ‘outside the box’ thinking.

Take note that with great power comes great temptation. Just because you CAN do some of these things does not mean that you SHOULD. There is a point where the addition of too many niceties will result in a document that can be too complex or distracting for others. A wow feature here or there will captivate your audience, but too many and they will begin to feel lost. Keep this in mind when working through your future projects.

An Activity

Let’s put your knowledge to the test! Using some of the key terms and tools we have seen in this guide we will create a document that we can then use in our day to day routines, and share with our family and friends.

We will start by opening a blank document, and we will be creating a shopping list. This might sound easy enough, right? See if you can follow all the steps and come out with something that looks like that I have done!

Instructions:

Format the new document with a large header text calling it your ‘Grocery List’, with this I like to have the date in the top left of my page when I print my grocery list so that I know I’m taking the right one as I leave the house.

Add a section for each of your main categories of products which you will need to go out and purchase. I use three categories to organise my purchases, they are ‘Necessities’, ‘Food’, and ‘Snacks & Treats’.

Each category has its own column where I can list what I want to buy, and to the left of each product I give it an importance rating. This rating is from 1-3, with 1 being the most important. I do this so that I know which items to skip for the week if they are too expensive or out of stock at the store. To make sure that I don’t mess up the ratings when I’m shopping, as I fill out the importance rating, the colour of the background where the numbers are changes to green if it is rated a 1, and red if it rated a 3, if it is rated a 2 the background stays white. (Hint: Once you write the rule once, use the format painter for the rest!)

I never have more than 15 items in each category, and I make sure that I keep to that limit by putting a nice thick border around each category and its column, while having normal/thin borders everywhere within those 15 rows. To make it even more evident, I keep the three category labels in bold.

I like to keep things tidy, and because of this I align all my text to the center of the cell they are in.

Lastly, I like to put something at the bottom of these sheets so that they look a little prettier! In this case, I’m going to make one big cell at the end of my rows, and insert a picture of something represents a grocery store. You can pick the one of your choosing.

Once that is all done, I am ready to print my shopping list!

If you want to see what my final result looks like you can download the PDF file HERE, or the Excel file HERE.