News

Do you want to learn about Excel or are you looking to gain more advanced skills?

Led by Julie Marcoux of the Dalhousie Libraries, the Excel sessions for the Dalhousie Libraries Research Bootcamp for the Truro campus have been rescheduled to July 14th. Sessions are held in Cox Institute, Room C16 (computer lab).

Each session can accommodate 30 participants and sign up is on a first come, first serve basis. These are primarily for graduate students and research assistants, although anyone on campus is welcome to register and participate.

Computers are available in the lab and you do not need to bring a laptop. We will be using Excel 2013.

The files needed for the session are available on the bootcamp's website  Both session 3 and session 4 will be using files from Excel 3 on the bootcamp website.

Register for all Excel sessions or a specific Excel session using this form:  Descriptions of each session is below:

Session 1: Easy Excel for beginners (2 hours)
9:00-11:00am
Learn to beautifully format and print tables of data. Discuss some common fixes that can be applied to messy external data. Practice cleaning and analyzing data using Excel's built in tools. This workshop covers formatting, filtering, conditional formatting, and a very brief introduction to pivot charts. Prerequisite: none, but will be most appreciated if you are comfortable selecting cells and groups of cells in Excel.

Session 2: Fun with Excel formulas (45 minutes to 1 hour)
11:00 – 12:00pm
Your pigeons are escaping! To calculate your losses, you will learn everything there is to know about using formulas in Excel: finding useful formulas, manually entering formulas in Excel, arguments of a formula, using absolute versus relative cell addresses and using names in formulas. Prerequisite: be comfortable selecting cells and groups of cells in Excel.

Session 3: Excel Experts (1.5 hours)
1:00-2:30pm
A wonderful selection of advanced formulas and Excel functions to use when working with data! Learn about string functions, removing duplicates, using criteria in formulas, Vlookup, and locating special cells (blanks, formulas, etc.) in a worksheet. Prerequisite: be comfortable manually entering simple formulas into Excel.

Session 4: Automate Your World with Excel Macros (1 hour)
2:30-3:30pm
Learning to record Excel macros is easy! Modifying Excel macros is easy! Mastering Excel macros is…a bit more work, but worth it! Learn tricks that will allow you to save time on repetitive Excel tasks and automate some of your tasks! Even if you are not yet ready to master macros, just learning about the possibilities might save you hours of your time!

If you have any questions, please contact Erin MacPherson at Erin.MacPherson@dal.ca at the MacRae Library. Hope to see you there!