This course is aimed at professionals who have, or will soon have, responsibility for managing and manipulating data using MS Excel on a day to day basis.  The course assumes zero knowledge, begins with an introduction to the Excel environment and ends with delegates being skilled in using 50+ MS Excel functions, sophisticated data management and charting techniques and advanced data analysis capability.

Do you still think that Excel is a tool that is used only by people in your company’s finance department? If so, you are wrong. It does have fantastic financial modeling capability but it offers so much more than that. Excel is not reserved for financial data. Everyone in middle to senior management manages some kind of data and hence the need to attend this course.

This course will feature:

• Advanced data analysis
• Both textual and numerical data
• Forecasting
• Advanced charting
• Scenario analysis

By the end of this course, participants will be able to:

• Analyse relationships across information and data using MS Excel.
• Generate data forecasts using MS Excel.
• Organise your company’s data in a more structured manner.
• Analyse your data effectively using various MS Excel techniques.
• Select the appropriate chart for your data.

This course is suitable to a wide range of professionals but will greatly benefit:

• Administrators using MS Excel at a very basic level
• Administrators with a need to improve data management techniques utilising MS Excel
• New Administrative Staff with no prior knowledge of MS Excel
• HR professionals seeking to use MS Excel to analyse employee data and inventory data
• Oil and Gas, telecommunications and electricity industry employees looking to improve their data management and data representation skills

This course will utilise a variety of proven adult learning techniques to ensure maximum understanding, comprehension and retention of the information presented. The course will be split up into themes with a series of exercises based on each theme. The approach will also be incremental with each session building on prior knowledge. Each delegate will be introduced to practical, hands-on learning using MS Excel.

Delegates can bring their own Windows or Mac OS laptop also to the sessions, for them to be comfortable with the environment and version of MS Excel that they will be working on.

Day One

An Introduction to the MS Excel Environment

• Cell referencing, cell formatting and entering formula
• Workbooks versus Worksheets
• Copy and pasting
• Left click versus right click
• Paste Special
• Introductory charts

Day Two

Using MS Excel Functions for Fundamental Data Analysis

• Use of text function, FIND(), LEN(), LEFT(), RIGHT() and &
• Use of count functions, COUNTA(), COUNTIF(), COUNTIFS() and SUMIF()
• Basic statistical functions, Max and Average
• Filtering, sorting and use of conditional formatting
• Scatter diagrams

Day Three

Intermediate MS Excel Functions

• Use of VLOOKUP() and HLOOKUP()
• Date functions, YEAR(), MONTH(), DAY(), YEARFRAC()
• Selecting appropriate charts
• Introduction to Pivot tables

Day Four

Carrying out Statistical Analysis using MS Excel

• Using MS Excel to calculate mean, mode and median
• The difference between the various standard deviation and variance function in MS Excel
• Using MS Excel to examine inter-dependency
• Drawing histograms in MS Excel
• Introduction to Data Analysis functions

Day Five

What if and Scenario Analysis Using MS Excel

• Naming cells in MS Excel
• Linking cells together to undertake scenario analysis
• Introduction to solver
• Advanced charting
• Sharing MS Excel output with other office formats