Excel basics
Use these questions as a learning tool. Treat them like a quiz. Answer in your mind, and using the tool, and writing them down. Make it stick!
- Quiz yourself
- How much can you remember without this list (below)?
- What is missing from this list?
- Don’t just go through the posted notes to answer this. First, recall everything you can, and try it out. Then review notes to recall what you missed.
- Develop the “muscle memory” of using the tool
Variables
- Review how to use named variables
- Where are they set?
- Where is the Named Variables Manager?
- Are they global or local?
- What are the limitations on the names used?
Basic functions
- What are function names for natural and base-10 logs?
- trig functions?
- sum, square root, pi?
- How to convert a number to an integer by chopping the decimal part?
- How to convert a number to an integer by rounding?
- minimum, maximum, average, standard deviation, mode
- Count based on a condition, or more than one condition
- Current date and time?
- others: explore
Locked cells
- What is a locked cell reference in the context of dragging, moving, or copying cells?
- What is the shortcut key to lock a cell reference on your computer?
- What is the symbol used to lock a cell reference?
- Lock row, or column, or both
Plotting
- What is our favorite type of plot in engineering?
- Review how to format: font, marker style, line style.
- How to change axes limits, or convert to a log scale
- Does the x-axis have to be on the left of the y axis, or is that only assumed when selecting data for a plot?
- What does right click on the plot then “select data” do?
- How do you add a trendline to a set of data?
- What are a couple ways to add data series to a plot?
- Excel is really flexible for making a plot. What if you wanted to make 100 plots? (That’s too many clicks. In Python, we “code” the plots and make 100 in a loop. The animated gif plot at the top of this page was made that way; the movie is actually just a plot of data!).
Load external data
- How do you load external data from a file?
- Copy, paste, text-to-columns
- Fixed-width, versus delimited