Common overlooked Excel functions

My work is not mainly about Excel but people often come to me for solution to their everyday computing problems. Eventually after several months of repeating the same thing to many people, I decided to sum up all the questions and make a training session covering simple but many people just don’t know they existed in Excel.

I am not intending to teach people how to use Excel but how to use it efficiently. So my method is mostly visual-based: I use a lot of images to illustrate concepts so they can recall what I’ve said later easily. I intended to make some practice exercise to reinforce their knowledge too but my folks were strongly oppose against homework so that idea was abandoned :p

The first session have 4 attendants, which I considered a successful experiment. It lasted for around 45 minutes and covered the following topics:

• Quick count
• Conditional counting
• Counting with multiple conditions
• Look-up functions
• Error handling
• Pivot tables
• Data validation
• Cell formatting
• Visual Basic for Application basics

I intended to record the session for later broadcast but forgot it on that day. So if you are interested, here are the slides at screen resolution (72 dpi i.e. it look pretty crooked) together with notes in PDF format. Powerpoint file  is available upon request if you want to conduct similar sessions. I love to spread knowledge 🙂

Enjoy!