Excel: a practical introduction for students and others

by David Coley, Mike Wood (Illustrator)

This short book is suitable for those at university, those about to go to university, the later years at high school, continuing professional development, or anyone who needs to learn how to produce useful spreadsheets. It is largely hands-on and can be used for self-study by university students, or under supervision by high school students. It contains a series of exercises that can be used for assessment. By working through the exercises you will be left with a lot of knowledge and a model that will allow you to design a zero energy home.

This short course is only that - short. It won’t make you an expert in Excel and it doesn’t cover some of the more advanced topics such as writing macros. It also doesn’t cover the details of every in-built Excel function (although most functions are listed in the Appendix), or, for example, show you every permutation of each chart type. It is more than a book just on Excel; it is about using Excel properly. Its aim is to encourage you to think about problem solving in a new way. A way that leaves a permanent record of your work that you can return to easily, and that is of use to others. This should be contrasted with approaches where you complete exercises with pen, paper and calculator, and where the results normally make their way to the trash can, or the dark recesses of a folder.

We have found that although many students have used Excel, this has normally been only to process numbers in a simple way and to draw a graph. This doesn’t really expose the student to the transformative potential of a numeric environment such as Excel. Hence a second aim of the course is to introduce you to the concept of modelling. By this we mean using a theoretical view of one aspect of the world to create a model of this aspect, then to play with it to see what might happen under various circumstances. The model might be one aspect of physics or engineering, or it might be a model of the finances of a company. Whatever you are studying at school, university or do for a living, we hope you will finish the course with a well-developed sense that it is often worth building a model of a situation in Excel in order to see what happens under a variety of circumstances.

David Coley is Profesor of Low Carbon Design in the Department of Architecture and Civil Engineering at the University of Bath, UK

217 pages, Kindle Edition

First published June 8, 2015