Microsoft Excel for Office 365 (Desktop or Online): Part 3

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Overview

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Clearly, you use Microsoft® Excel® a lot in your role. Otherwise, you wouldn't be taking this course. By now, you're already familiar with Excel, its functions and formulas, a lot of its features and functionality, and its powerful data analysis tools. You are likely called upon to analyze and report on data frequently, work in collaboration with others to deliver actionable organizational intelligence, and keep and maintain workbooks for all manner of purposes. At this level of use and collaboration, you have also likely encountered your fair share of issues and challenges. You're too busy, though, to waste time scouring over workbooks to resolve issues or to perform repetitive, monotonous tasks. You need to know how to get Excel to do more for you so you can focus on what's really important: staying ahead of the competition. That's exactly what this course aims to help you do. This course builds on the foundational and intermediate knowledge presented in the Microsoft® Excel® for Office 365™ (Desktop or Online): Part 1 and Microsoft® Excel® for Office 365™ (Desktop or Online): Part 2 courses to help you get the most of your Excel experience. The ability to collaborate with colleagues, automate complex or repetitive tasks, and use conditional logic to construct and apply elaborate formulas and functions will put the full power of Excel right at your fingertips. The more you learn about how to get Excel to do the hard work for you, the more you'll be able to focus on getting the answers you need from the vast amounts of data your organization generates. Note: Most Microsoft 365™ users perform the majority of their daily tasks using the desktop version of the Office software, so that is the focus of this training. The course material will also enable you to access and effectively utilize many web-based resources provided with your Microsoft 365 subscription. This includes brief coverage of key skills for using Excel for the Web and OneDrive. Helpful notes throughout the material alert you to cases where the online version of the application may function differently from the primary, desktop version. This course may be a useful component in your preparation for the Microsoft Excel (Microsoft 365 Apps): Exam MO-210 and Microsoft Excel Expert (Microsoft 365 Apps): Exam MO-211 certification exams. This course is intended for students who are experienced Excel users and have a desire or need to increase their skills in working with some of the more advanced Excel features. Students will likely need to troubleshoot large, complex workbooks, automate repetitive tasks, engage in collaborative partnerships involving workbook data, construct complex Excel functions, and use those functions to perform rigorous analysis of extensive, complex datasets. To ensure success, students should have practical, real-world experience creating and analyzing datasets by using Excel. Specific tasks students should be able to perform include: creating formulas and using Excel functions; creating, sorting, and filtering datasets and tables; presenting data by using basic charts; creating and working with PivotTables, slicers, and PivotCharts; and customizing the Excel environment. In this course, you will: work with multiple worksheets and workbooks, share and protect workbooks, automate workbook functionality, use Lookup functions and formula auditing, forecast data, and create sparklines and map data. This course requires that you have Microsoft Excel installed on a Windows PC. The course setup instructions provided in the first module of the course go into more detail about the hardware and software requirements.

Syllabus

Working with Multiple Worksheets and Workbooks

In many cases, you are collecting or tracking data in one or more worksheets in a workbook. Although you know how to summarize the data on one worksheet, you may wish to combine the data into a report from these individual worksheets or even from other workbooks. Excel has several features that allow you to aggregate the data to generate those reports.

Sharing and Protecting Workbooks

Nothing happens in a vacuum. It is a near certainty that you collaborate with numerous people in different roles fairly regularly. And it's likely that some of those people contribute to or review your work in a variety of capacities. As such, it's essential that you are able to collaborate with colleagues, provide and receive feedback on workbooks, and ensure that everyone's input is reflected in the final version of your documents. Unfortunately, the more you share and collaborate with others, especially when they have differing levels of authority or clearance, the more you need to ensure your critical organizational data is protected. But, how do you balance the need to share with the need to keep a wrap on your sensitive information?

Automating Workbook Functionality

Working with large workbooks presents a number of challenges. Entering large amounts of data can be time consuming and prone to errors. You may also find yourself spending a lot of time and effort performing the same few tasks over and over again. And, the more people who work in the same workbook, the more these types of issues become magnified. In short, as you develop ever-larger and more complex workbooks, you'll want to find ways to automate tasks to save time, reduce errors, and generally make using your workbooks easier.

Using Lookup Functions and Formula Auditing

The formulas and functions within Microsoft® Excel® provide you with a robust set of options for performing complex calculations on the data in your workbooks. But on their own, they may not always perform the precise calculations you need them to. For example, you may need a function to reference a value from another dataset based on some particular criteria. But, how do you tell the function how to look that up? Or perhaps you need one of your arguments to be the result of another formula or function. As your workbooks become larger and more complex, errors can crop up, and searching for the cause of errors or unexpected results and troubleshooting your formulas and functions can become a nightmare.

Forecasting Data

By now, you're likely well acquainted with creating, building, and maintaining Microsoft® Excel® workbooks and performing all manner of data analysis. When you have all of the data you need and that data is in the correct format, there are practically limitless questions you can use Excel to answer. This is all fine and good when you have a specific question in mind and you're looking for one specific answer. But, what if you want to know how things will change if any number of variables themselves change? After all, you can never know for sure just how things will play out in the future. You could simply keep re-entering your data with different values, or you could make numerous copies of your data and update values as needed. But this all takes a lot of time and uses a lot of worksheet real estate to accomplish. And, you'll be saving ever-larger workbook files in the process. In short, if you need to crunch your numbers with a variety of different values to anticipate a variety of possible scenarios, you'll want some sort of automated way to do so.

Creating Sparklines and Mapping Data

Often, images can tell a story or provide insight in an instantaneous fashion that isn't always possible with words and numbers. When you're presenting complex relationships among various bits of data to large groups of people, you may find it easier to display a chart or a map instead of asking the audience to pore over massive amounts of data to see your point.