This series of four one-hour sessions provided library workers the opportunity to learn and apply essential Microsoft Excel skills. Each session focused on a practical library project or set of tasks. The series did not provide a comprehensive overview of Excel functionality. Instead, we focused on selected practical skills as applied to real projects.
Generally speaking, we progressed from novice to intermediate skills, but because we worked on projects, we developed a mix of skills with each project. The sessions focused on specific projects, but the skills are applicable to many other kinds of projects and tasks, so even if one doesn’t perform exactly this kind of library work, the skills should be useful in other contexts.
During each session, the example project was demonstrated live. Each session was recorded. Handouts and sample datasets were provided so that participants can complete the projects on their own. The recordings, handouts, and sample datasets are available on the Project pages of this libguide.
See the project pages for a list of specific functionality we learned in this series. Suffice to say, aside from the basics, we dove pretty deeply into Excel functions. We learned basic pivot tables and charts. We explored how Power Query and Microsoft Access might supplement Excel to help us save time and effort. We learned some basics of data modelling and glanced at how an effective data model can be used to create a new report in Power BI. We also very briefly looked at how ChatGPT could potentially handle one of our projects.
