Welcome! This online training course is suitable for anyone who knows Microsoft® Excel spreadsheet basics -- especially Microsoft Excel terms and techniques -- and is ready to learn more. This course will cover key areas like calculation, formatting, data management, and cell referencing. In this free tutorial, you'll get plenty of training and tips on Microsoft Excel spreadsheets and pick up some insider techniques not easily found through Microsoft Excel support channels.

What you should already know

This free tutorial is for anyone who has basic Microsoft Excel skills and a desire to further his or her education. To do well in this course, you should already know how to do the following:

• Enter and edit text in cells
• Add and delete rows, columns, and cells
• Change row height and column width
• Apply text formatting including different fonts, sizes, and colors
• Format cells with borders and shading
• Use basic number formatting such as currency and percentage
• Create Microsoft Excel formulas and use simple functions like SUM, AVERAGE, and COUNT

If you don't have these skills, consider taking one or two introductory Excel 2007 classes first. This intermediate course is one in a series of free online courses designed to help you learn Excel -- from the basics through advanced levels.

What you'll learn

This course consists of four lessons with a simple quiz and an assignment for each lesson. The lessons are as follows:

• Lesson 1, "Functions": Review the basics of formulas and functions, learn about absolute referencing, and create several worksheets that perform useful calculations.
• Lesson 2, "Working with multiple worksheets": Learn how to work with worksheet names and tabs, manage sheets, create cross-references between sheets, and protect sheets from changes.
• Lesson 3, "Finding, sorting and filtering": Manage long lists of data by employing sorting and filtering techniques.
• Lesson 4, "Performing advanced formatting": Learn how to format "beyond the basics" with formatting styles and themes, conditional formatting, custom number formats, and custom headers and footers.

Quizzes and assignments are for your learning experience only. Quizzes are computer-graded, and you may retake a quiz as many times as you like. Assignments are optional; however, working through the assignments enhances your learning experience and helps solidify key concepts and techniques for using Microsoft Excel 2007.

Throughout this course, we provide Flash examples. To view these examples, you need the Adobe Flash Player. Keep an eye out for notes with links that say "See how to ____" or something similar. Some of these files are very large (10 MB or so) and may take a while to appear or download if you have a slow connection.

Do I need Excel 2007?

This course is based on Microsoft Excel 2007, which is very different from earlier versions in terms of its interface. The Ribbon replaces the traditional menus and toolbars, so the steps presented in this course won't work for users of earlier Excel versions. However, the basic concepts are nearly identical; so if you can survive the interface differences, you can still get some useful information out of the course.

Lesson 1 overview

This first lesson covers a topic that intimidates a lot of people, but it's an important topic to know about: formulas and functions. In this lesson, after a brief review of formula and function basics, you'll learn about date and time functions, absolute references, named ranges, and the Name Manager. This lesson finishes up by showing you how to create a checkbook register. Now you can get started.