Excel University Passport
Learning Excel is a bit like taking a tour and visiting various places. The Excel University Passport is a free gift that can help you learn Excel and work faster.
The idea is that you download the Passport PDF and print it. You fold it into a little booklet. As you visit each stop during the Excel tour, you stamp each page complete.
You'll visit each of the 6 stops below during your tour. Perform the suggested learning activities to complete your tour.
If you haven't already downloaded the Passport, you can use the button below.
Process: Speed Loop
Working fast in Excel requires 2 things: Process + Skills. This tour covers both, let's start with the process.
At Excel University, we teach the Speed Loop process as the formal system to optimize your workbooks for efficiency and accuracy. It sets the stage for all of the Excel skills that follow.
The Speed Loop process helps you optimize your workbooks for efficiency and accuracy.
Invest Time
- Identify recurring project workbooks
- Insert lead sheets
Appreciate Assets
- Automate manual tasks
- Anticipate errors
- Accumulate Excel skills
Realize Gain
- Rebuild workbooks
- Reinvest time savings
Suggested Learning Activity: Watch the free Speed Loop webinar and mark this step complete.
Skills: Fundamentals
There are a few fundamentals that will help you as you use Excel.
We offer a free course that discusses these fundamentals ... which we call the 3 keys.
The Excel 100: Intro to Excel course is designed for people just getting started, so if you've been using Excel for a while feel free to skip it. However, the course doesn't take very long so you may want to check it out as the principles may be helpful.
Suggested Learning Activity: Take the free course and mark your passport page complete.
Skills: Functions
One of the keys discussed in the Excel 100 course is to use formulas to compute values whenever possible. By getting Excel to compute a value, it means we don't have to type the value manually. This saves time.
There are 500+ Excel functions that we can use to build our formulas.
Since Excel is used for so many different things by so many different people, it is hard to narrow it down to a short list that would apply to all users.
But, I believe that the functions below have the potential to help many users work faster.
- SUBTOTAL - excludes other SUBTOTAL functions.
- SUMIFS - multiple condition summing.
- XLOOKUP - improved lookup available in some Excel versions.
Note: if your Excel doesn't have XLOOKUP then check out VLOOKUP instead.
Suggested Learning Activity: Click each function to read the corresponding article and mark your passport page complete.
Skills: Features
One of the keys discussed in Excel 100 is to use features whenever possible. That is, instead of doing a task manually, we want to put Excel to work for us.
With the vast number of features and commands available in Excel, it is difficult to create a list that would apply to all Excel users.
But, here are three features I believe have the possibility to help many users work faster.
- Tables - tables auto-expand.
- PivotTables - PivotTables are interactive reports and they make it easy to create monthly columns.
- Conditional Formatting - automatically format cells based on defined rules.
Suggested Learning Activity: read each article to complete this passport page.
Skills: Power
Now that we are familiar with the fundamentals and know a few functions and features, it is time to learn more powerful tools.
These are really big areas to explore, but I've pulled together a few articles that can help you get your bearings and get started.
- Power Query - get and transform data.
- Power Pivot - manage the data model to use as a report data source.
- Power BI - this is not an Excel tool, but, it is so closely related it is worth exploring. It provides Power Query and Power Pivot in a standalone desktop app and related service. If your version of Excel doesn't have Power Query or Power Pivot, this is definitely worth checking out.
Suggested Learning Activity: read each article above and mark your passport page complete.
Skills: Macros
Macros are a series of instructions that Excel can execute. The instructions are written in a special language called VBA (visual basic for applications). This is a very big area to explore, but I've pulled together a few articles that can help you get started.
We can use macros to make it faster to apply built-in features or to automate things when there isn't a corresponding command.
For example, we can use a macro to:
Suggested Learning Activity: read each article and mark this complete.
Thank You!
Thanks for taking our Excel Highlights tour. I hope it was helpful!
Excel is a big place. If you'd like to learn more, please check out our online training options.
Pass it on...
If you found this passport helpful, please pass it on to a friend 🙂
Just copy/paste the link below and txt/email it to your friend:
https://www.excel-university.com/free-gift