Applied MS Excel for Business Short Courses

• Review of writing arithmetic formulas - precedence of operators and the proper use of brackets
• The formula for compound interest (the most important basis of financial mathematics)
• Goal Seek - this tool has many and varied uses when working with mathematical formulas, often making it much easier to get answers to difficult questions.
• Calculating depreciation using Goal Seek and without using the built in functions
• Calculating depreciation using the built in functions DB and SLN
• The use of the IF function in Excel to analyse and interpret input data - e.g. grading student marks, calculating discounts, and wage bonus calculation.
• The use of nested IF functions is covered extensively to deal with more complicated problems.
• Filling in an order form with the aid of drop-down lists, automatic price lookup and calculation of discount
• The use of the database functions (DCOUNT, DSUM and DAVERAGE) to produce an automatically updating monthly report
• Analyse tabular information using Pivot Table Wizard (for example data gathered about voting patterns in an election)
• An introduction to recording and writing simple Visual Basic Macro programs and suggested uses of simple macros
• The use of Scenario Manager in a forecasting environment

By the end of the course, you will be able to:

• use Intermediate level and some Advanced level facilities of the Microsoft Excel spreadsheet package such as Goal Seek, Scenario Manager, the VLOOKUP function, Pivot Tables and simple Macros
• use DSUM, DAVERAGE,DCOUNT functions, using multiple extraction criteria to summarise information in a database table
• use complex nested formulas and logical tests in a business context (e.g. working out bonus payments linked to performance)
• design tree diagrams to analyse situations where more complex examples of nested formulas and logical tests are required
• demonstrate an understanding of the variety of solutions that exist within Excel to common business scenarios; be capable of selecting an appropriate one.