Excel Help!

Hello

I'm looking to start building a spreadsheet to handle my Fields of Battle stuff.

HOWEVER I have never programmed a THING for Excel. I'm a total noob.

Anyone have any suggestions on how best to learn it?

Thanks

Play around with it. Use help fuction. Save all the time. Pick up a guide.

If you've never used Excel at all, I have two recommendations:

1. (Cheap) Get a "dummies" book. Most of these books are actually pretty good at walking a new user through the most basic tasks, with plenty of graphics and useful tips. Cost: $20 or so.

2. (Not-so-cheap) Take a 1-2 hour course at your local community college. The intro classes usually do a decent job of walking you through the exercises, and to learn a program you really have to just get in there and do stuff with it. Also, I've found that the textbooks are first-rate, if expensive (the ones I have are by a company named Course Technology). The main drawback is that there's always someone in the class who doesn't know how to open a file, or start windows, and he/she will slow everyone else down. Also, you can't be sure you'll get a good instructor, or someboyd just faking it. Cost: $50-$60 per credit hour, plus $40+ for the textbook.

Regardless of your learning method, use it or lose it. The only way to remember is to keep at it. And the best way to learn how to do some of the obscure stuff is to just play around.

Also, I believe there are a couple websites where you can post specific Excel questions and get them answered. Here's one bulletin board that might help:

http://www.mrexcel.com/board2

Good luck!

Sir Whiskers said:

Also, I believe there are a couple websites where you can post specific Excel questions and get them answered. Here's one bulletin board that might help:

http://www.mrexcel.com/board2

Good luck!

Click to expand...

mrexcel.com is an amazing site. I can't believe the knowledge some of those users have. I had no clue about some of the things Excel was capable of until going there.

If you've ever done any programming at all (macro, scripts, etc.) it will come to you fairly easily. The main thing that helped me learn (self taught) was to look at the formulas and formats for the spreadsheets that I liked and try to copy them. I used techniques from a variety of sheets and figured out other stuff as I went along. Excel is truly awesome once you learn it. I'm still picking up techniques to make my sheets smoother and cleaner and in some cases function better.

I've written several complex spreadsheets for business applications. If you could give me a detailed list of what you're trying to accomplish, I may be able to help.

Ibram Gaunt said:

Hello

I'm looking to start building a spreadsheet to handle my Fields of Battle stuff.

HOWEVER I have never programmed a THING for Excel. I'm a total noob.

Anyone have any suggestions on how best to learn it?

Thanks

Click to expand...

I would start with the MS Press "Step-by-Step" guide first. This will demonstrate some of the things Excel can do, and how. Each lesson is short, and you can skip around freely. Worksheets are included on CD for each lesson. You can get the Step-by-Step guides for around $25 new.

Then, jump in and start creating. The help files are excellent, use judiciously. If you are like most and don't care to read the manual cover to cover first, then read the table of contents of whatever study guide you choose, then start your sheet. When you get stumped, read the section or lesson that applies to what you are trying to do, then practice on your own sheets.

With this method, and creating an advanced character sheet for my 3e campaign, I went from a passing knowledge of Excel to earning a Master level cert from MS in one year. I knew gaming was good for something!

double post

I've done quite a bit of fairly complex stuff with Excel and OLEing into Excel. All of the above is pretty good advice. What I haven't seen stated is:

1) Excel uses VBA, which is a pared down version of Visual Basic. If you've done _any_ programming, it's probably in some flavor of Basic (C64, Apple II series, QBasic, LotusScript, OracleBasic, etc.). The vast majority of that knowledge will help you, as will much of the reference material for those languages. Of course, anything VBA/Excel specific is best.

2) Cheat! This is the best advice I can give you. Excel has an awesome macro recorder. Record something similar to what you want to do, look at the code it comes up with, and tweak it untill you get what you need. I've been working with VBA in Excel pretty much since VBA was added to Excel and I still do this quite often. Not only do you get something that is nearly a final product, but you get a code sample that you can review.

3) Use the included help files. Sometimes these can get kinda thick, but you can get some good information out of them, still. Using the macro recorder to generate code, then using context help to understand what the code does is usually a great way of figuring things out, IME.