Continuing on with our "What's inside Excel Everest?" series...

Excel Everest Scoreboard

This page allows you and/or your manager to watch your progress as you climb Excel Everest. The charts and graphs below show how many and what percentage of the problems you've completed correctly in our Excel training. For the problems in Excel Everest that are automatically graded, you don't need to do anything to get credit. For the problems that cannot be automatically graded, make sure to check the boxes found in each problem to indicate that you've done them. The bar graphs will fill as you complete the tutorial and you'll even get surprise badges at certain milestones!

What's Inside Excel Everest

Continuing on with our "What's inside Excel Everest?" series...

Library - other resources to help you learn

As action packed as this tutorial is, it's not the end of your Excel learning :). There may not be higher mountains than Excel Everest, but  there are certainly others. In fact, the material here represents only the beginning of what Excel can do. There are plenty of great free (and cheap) resources online but they're found all over the Internet. We've done some digging and shelved some of the ones we think are top-notch. Click on the logos below to visit the sites.

Also keep in mind that Excel learning can often start with searching the Internet.

What's Inside Excel Everest

Continuing on with our "What's inside Excel Everest?" series, which showcases the introductory, "Why is this important?" paragraphs found within Excel Everest.

...why is it important to learn?...

Printing from Excel

With nearly infinite white space in every Excel worksheet with which to put your numbers and data, printing from Excel can get a bit confusing. Let's quickly go through how to define regions and make sure what you want to print is actually printed. That being said, Excel isn't great for printing. And printing is bad for trees. So try not to print!

What's Inside Excel Everest

Continuing on with our "What's inside Excel Everest?" series, which showcases the introductory, "Why is this important?" paragraphs found within Excel Everest.

...why is it important to learn?...

Basic macros

Macros bring Excel to life. Want to see how? Simply go to the index page of this tutorial and hit the fun button in the top right. See, Excel is alive! But don't worry, they can be used for much more practical purposes than that. Macros are able to do repetitive operations for you and manipulate data and control Excel in a way that normal Excel functions wouldn't allow. They are essentially instructions given to Excel to do certain things written in a simple programming language called VBA (Visual Basic for Applications). With VBA, you give Excel operations to perform in the form of written instructions, and it does so, at light speed! For instance, the stars you see in the fun button macro on the index page are really just Excel putting the "*" character in and out of the cells (randomly). And then the bear coming across the screen is just VBA telling Excel to move that object to a certain position and then switch to another. Macros can get highly complicated but it's important to understand what they are as well as to have a handle on how to record your very own. Let's look at how to do this.

Note that for this topic, you need to have the "Developer" tab visible in your ribbon. If you don't see it, click on the round button, go to Excel options, and then, under popular, hit "show developer tab in ribbon".

What's Inside Excel Everest

Continuing on with our "What's inside Excel Everest?" series, which showcases the introductory, "Why is this important?" paragraphs found within Excel Everest.

...why is it important to learn?...

The joy of keyboard shortcuts

Keyboard shortcuts exist to make your life easier, but are often overlooked in importance. Imagine that every time you pasted anything in Excel you didn't use a keyboard shortcut and you pasted at least 20 times a day. Those seconds you waste would add up quickly, adding hours and hours to your work-life over the course of the year. Spending 20 solid minutes mastering keyboard shortcuts has a tremendous return on investment, and there's not that many you need to know. We'll highlight a few essential shortcuts here to get you started and then ALWAYS keep them in mind for when you find yourself doing repetitive functions in Excel. Also, as a sort of bonus, many of these keyboard shortcuts transfer over to Microsoft Word and other places, so once you learn a few in Excel, your whole computing life will become easier!

One great thing about Excel 2007 is that when you hit the Alt key, little keyboard shortcut indicators pop up in the ribbon. You can follow those and use them as a guide to learn different shortcuts when you find yourself doing repetitive tasks.  A useful tip to help you learn keyboard shortcuts is to first hide the ribbon with Ctrl-F1, and then leave it hiddent and only use the Alt key and these little guides to do everything you need to in Excel.

What's Inside Excel Everest