The new guy

You know what it's like, the new guy starts and someone says to you "get him up to speed on Excel". Then a big project comes up and all your "training" time is stripped away from you. I tend to chuck them the "Excel 2003 Bible", "Excel 2003 Formulas", send them some links and say "look at those" and see how it goes. Unfortunatley this approach seems to cause more trouble then good (at the moment the new guy keeps testing my knowledge and patience by quizzing me on Excel limits and specs, damn that help file!). So on my way to work this morning I jotted down some formulas and Excel features to try and structure my approach. This is the listing I came up with (in no particular order):

Formulas:

Count/Counta, Countif, Sumif, Subtotal, Max/Min, If/And/Or, Left/Right/Mid, Find/Substitute, Iserror (I know someone will shoot me for addin this), Dsum/Dcount/Dcounta, & (for concatenating), Abs, Datedif, Sumproduct, V/Hlookup (of course).

Excel features (I know, wrong word "features", but its early and I'm not caffeined up yet):

Conditional Formatting, Text To Columns, Paste Special (what would we do without it), Move/Copy sheet, Named Ranges, PivotTables, Edit Links, and maybe touch on Import External Data.

I have also added to the syllabus shortcut/accelerator keys.

This will not give him all the knowledge he needs, however this should give him the foundations he needs to stop asking me how many nested functions you can have (7 by the way) or what is the decimal for 9am (0.375, really had to think about that one, and I got it wrong!), and I should be able to get on with my work.

Comments and suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Giff

Giff

That's a big list. It will be very tough to lead anyone in a 'correct' direction as it varies widely on 'application'. For example, I am a date guy, so pivots, external data would be top of my list. Although I have never really been a charting guru, it coming up my league as the more data I crunch the more I need to see 'patterns' in the data which are much more obvious in charts.

I would NEVER use the database 'Dx' functions, preferring combinations of VLOOKUP, MATCH, INDEX, MIN, MAX, etc.

I would ensure everyone knows when and when not is use ISERROR, so add ISNA and ISERR. If you are working with times from disparate systems I would also look at date and time functions. DATEVALUE, TIMEVALUE, DATE, etc as often dates are either text or non-Excel formatted. Equally I never use SUBTOTAL outside of the UI functionality.

I would add charting to your 'features' list.

Remember too, if you are working toward XL2007, there is quite big differences in charting, conditional formatting, pivot tables, and the number of IFs is increased dramatically.

(NB: To find specifications in help, just type Excel Specifications ;-))

Have fun!

Can't believe I forgot charting. I think I'm going to remove PivotTables as I prefer to teach non-ui principles, then show them pivots/subtotals (teach him to add, then give him the calculator kinda thing). May even remove Text to Columns and add that to importing external data at a later date.

I like people to learn like I did, from the ground up, it means that every new timesaving feature you find in Excel looks like it was designed specifically for you.

Giff