Let’s face it, we all we all master skills in our own way, but building a soup-to-nuts project is one of the best ways to make learning stick and up and get up-to-speed quickly. Whether you are just getting started with Excel or an experienced user, this book will elevate your knowledge and skills. For a beginner, the micro examples in each chapter will warm you up before you dive into the projects. For experienced users, the projects, especially those with table setup considerations, will help you become more creative in your interactions with Excel.

Readers will benefit from building eight unique projects, each covering a different topic, including a word game, food nutrition ranking, payroll (tax withholding) calculation, encryption, a two-way table, a Kaplan-Meier analysis, data analysis via a pivot table, and the data mining method “K-means clustering”. Through these projects, you will experience firsthand how Excel skills are organized together to accomplish tasks that when first described, sound complex and daunting.

Get started with a simple but interesting project, a word game, which asks users to find English words that amount to exactly 100 points, with each letter of the alphabet is assigned a point 1, 2, 3, …26, respectively. You will disassemble a word into letters and then sum up their points, and then take it one step further, contemplating how to make the completed Excel worksheet, more user-friendly and completely automated. Increasingly challenging tasks like this example build on what you have learned and increase your confidence along the way, ensuring your mastery of Excel!.

What You Will Learn

Gain confidence to tackle a challenging Excel-related mission, even when it seems impossible.

Become skilled in the creative uses of Excel formula / functions and other built-in features.

Appreciate the art of refining worksheets maximize automation.

Understand the value of treating each worksheet as a unique product.

This book is for people who are interested in learning Excel as quickly and efficiently as possible. While Excel beginners and intermediate users are the primary audience, experienced Excel users might also discover new skills and ways of working with Excel.