Overview
Whether you need to crunch numbers for sales, inventory, information technology, human resources, or other organizational purposes and departments, the ability to get the right information to the right people at the right time can create a powerful competitive advantage. After all, the world runs on data more than ever before and that's a trend not likely to change, or even slow down, any time soon. But with so much data available and being created on a nearly constant basis, the ability to make sense of that data becomes more critical and challenging with every passing day. You already know how to get Excel to perform simple calculations and how to modify your workbooks and worksheets to make them easier to read, interpret, and present to others. But Excel is capable of doing so much more. To gain a truly competitive edge, you need to be able to extract actionable organizational intelligence from your raw data, and present it in a visual format that enables decision makers to view key trends and conclusions at a glance. And that's exactly what this course aims to help you do.
This course builds upon the foundational knowledge presented in the Microsoft® Office Excel® 2013: Part 1 (Second Edition) course and will help start you down the road to creating advanced workbooks and worksheets that you can use to create dashboards. The ability to analyze massive amounts of data, extract actionable intelligence from it, and present that information to decision makers is the cornerstone of driving a successful organization that is able to compete at a high level.
Course Objectives
Upon successful completion of this course, you will be able to create dashboards in Microsoft Office Excel 2013.
You will:
- Create advanced formulas.
- Automate workbook functionality.
- Apply conditional logic.
- Visualize data by using basic charts.
- Implement advanced charting techniques.
- Analyze data by using PivotTables, slicers, and PivotCharts
Prerequisites
To ensure success, students should have completed Microsoft® Office Excel® 2013: Part 1 (Second Edition) or have the equivalent knowledge and experience. In particular, students should have some experience in creating workbooks with formulas and functions.
Target Student
This course is designed for students who already have foundational knowledge and skills in Excel 2013 and who wish to begin taking advantage of some of the higher-level functionality in Excel to summarize table data in Excel by using functions, charts, and pivot tables and display those elements in a dashboard format.
This course is a combination of selected topics from the courses Microsoft® Office Excel® 2013: Part 2 and Microsoft® Office Excel® 2013: Part 3 and is specifically designed to provide students with the skills and knowledge to create effective dashboards. If students have already taken these two courses, they are unlikely to garner much new information from this course.
Course-specific Technical Requirements
Hardware
For this course, you will need one workstation for each student and one for the instructor. Each computer will need the following minimum hardware configurations:
- 1 gigahertz (GHz) or faster x86- or x64-bit processor with support for PAE, NX, and SSE2
- 1 gigabyte (GB) of RAM for 32-bit systems and 2 GB of RAM for 64-bit systems
- 20 GB available hard disk space for 32-bit systems and 25 GB available hard disk space for 64-bit systems
- DirectX10 graphics card and a 1,024 x 576 or higher resolution monitor (1,024 × 768 resolution or higher monitor recommended)
- CD-ROM drive (if installing any software from a CD-ROM)
- Keyboard and mouse (or other pointing device)
- Network cards and cabling for local network access
- Internet access (contact your local network administrator)
- Printer (optional) or an installed printer driver
- Projection system to display the instructor's computer screen
Software
- Microsoft® Windows® 8 or 8.1 Professional
- Latest Microsoft Windows 8 or 8.1 Service Pack (if available)
- Microsoft® Office Professional Plus 2013 (32-bit or 64-bit depending on your system)
- Microsoft Office 2013 Service Pack 1 or latest update (32-bit update or 64-bit update depending on your system)
- Microsoft Internet Explorer 8, 9, 10, or 11; Mozilla Firefox 10.x or later, or Google Chrome 17.x
- Microsoft® Silverlight® 5.0 plug-in
- .NET Framework version 3.5, 4.0, or 4.5
- If necessary, software for viewing the course slides (instructor machine only)
Although it may be possible to deliver this course content by using Microsoft Office Excel 2013 on a Windows 7 installation, cannot guarantee that all activities will key as authored in that environment.
Course duration
1 Day
Course outline
Lesson 1: Creating Advanced Formulas
TopicA: Use Range Names in Formulas
TopicB: Use Specialized Functions
Lesson 2: Automating Workbook Functionality
TopicA: Apply Data Validation
TopicB: Work with Forms and Controls
Lesson 3: Applying Conditional Logic
TopicA: Use Lookup Functions
TopicB: Combine Functions
Lesson 4: Visualizing Data with Basic Charts
TopicA: Create Charts
TopicB: Modify and Format Charts
Lesson 5: Advanced Charting Techniques
TopicA: Use Advanced Chart Features
TopicB: Create Sparklines
Lesson 6: Analyzing Data with PivotTables, Slicers, and PivotCharts
TopicA: Create a PivotTable
TopicB: Analyze PivotTable Data
TopicC: Present Data with PivotCharts
TopicD: Filter Data by Using Slicers
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