Welcome to the course webpage for Excel the Mighty. The primary purpose of this course is to provide an enhanced working knowledge of Excel and how it can be used for business and for academic research. On this page you'll find links to the various files we'll be using inside and outside of class; the files are, of course, completely free for you to download, copy, print, sell, shred, and otherwise do with as you please.

In this course, of course, we will be enhancing your working knowledge of Microsoft Excel, which is a wonderfully useful and singularly unattractive program. Among the things we will discuss in this course are the following:

 Session 1: Our friend, Excel (August 4, 9:30-10:40) 

In this first session we will dovote ourselves to the basics of Excel. As you likely know, Excel is one of the Microsoft family of programs, and it is — quite frankly — very, very powerful. With no further ado, let's dive into some basics.

I think the best way to proceed would be to have all of us working with the same data set(s). Thus, here are the data sets for today's sessions.

 Data Sets 

 Session 2: Data Manipulation (August 4, 10:50-12:00) 

In this session we'll devote more time to basic manipulation of data in Excel, but we will extend this some to strings (no, not for flying kites). Details at 10:50.

For your viewing pleasure, here are my class notes from Tuesday. Again, feel free to download, copy, distribute, shred, or otherwise use this file in any way you see fit.

One more thing, Intrepid Excelers: here is a fine collection of Excel keyboard shortcuts. You'll notice that these are for Excel 2010, but I suspect most will still work with Excel 2013.

 Session 3: Creating Graphs (August 6, 9:30-10:40) 

This is perhaps the most enjoyable part of Excel, I think. In this session we will begin exploring how to create graphs, and I would hasten to add, "effective graphs."

In addition to the data files from our Tuesday session, we'll be using this nifty little Excel workbench file (File #4). Please also take a look at this example of an APA-compliant graph (#5).

 Session 4: Text (August 6, 10:40-12:00) 

One last and perhaps minor point is that our Mighty Excel is also useful for some text manipulation. Here is a list of text functions (#6) from our friends at Microsoft. For a wee bit of illustration, let's take a look at this handy-dandy file (#7).

 Examples from YouTube 

You will find some fine examples of Excel tutorials on YouTube. Be creative with your search terms and you might well find exactly what you need. You might also search for particular creators or even channels. Some that I've found include the following:

 Examples from the Net 

You will also find numerous webpages devoted to Excel. Some that I've found include the following: