Excel first steps (Excel for beginners session 1)

excel

beginner

Excel for beginners

Published

September 15, 2025

This session is part of our Excel for beginners course. That’s a series of six linked sessions, delivered on Teams, that give an introduction to Excel for people working in health and social care. The sessions are:

Together, they aim to help you develop an appropriate set of Excel skills to help your work. This session covers a general overview of our beginner’s skill tree:

you might find the list of Excel shortcuts helpful too

Previous attendees have said…

109 previous attendees have left feedback
99% would recommend this session to a colleague
95% said that this session was pitched correctly

Three random comments from previous attendees

Very helpful - training very interactive which was good.
It very helpful, definitely I will take part on next session.
I thought the session rambled quite a bit. The data provided for the attendees to type up, created problems and mouse movements were too fast for people to notice the change of shape and function, eg to drag column widths, copy formulas etc. If felt like missed opportunities.

Forthcoming session(s)

Booking link	Date
Excel first steps (Excel for beginners session 1)	10:00-11:30 Thu 6th November 2025

Video overview

A brief overview of Excel

Excel might be the cement of the universe

one of the oldest, and most widely used, pieces of desktop software
ubiquitous in business, finance, health and social care…
proprietary, closed-source, paid-for
many versions

But Excel is badly used, on the whole

PHE lost 16k COVID19+ results
MI5 bugged 134 people they didn’t mean to
JP Morgan 2012 had a manually-updated spreadsheet
- divided by sum, rather than average
- massive losses, $2 - $6 billion??

And most of us fall into Excel work…

most of us haven’t had any data training
- e.g. in KIND network (which is a very techy group) 75% didn’t have a formal qualification
and the responsibility for doing that data work well falls on many of us
- data work has become more prominent in lots of jobs
but good data work is really important…

Good data helps…

answering which/when questions
seeing effects of changes
comparing different areas
looking at services over time
…

One word of warning before the practical part

there are lots of versions of Excel
they all work slightly differently
please don’t panic if what you see looks slightly different from what I’m showing you
please ask if you’re not happy/confident!

Opening Excel (desktop)

find Excel in your Windows Start menu
you’ll need to create a new blank workbook

Opening Excel (web)

usually at https://www.office.com/launch/excel
you’ll need to create a new blank workbook

Interface

Central idea

pieces of data are stored in cells
- one value, one cell
cells are arranged into rows and columns
arranging data like this allows us to analyse it
it’s not just Word on a grid

Save, close, open

save your new workbook
close it
re-open it (possibly from recent files)

Important

We would strongly recommend that you don’t attempt any of these new techniques in your real data until you’re confident and happy about how they work
We would also remind you to always back up your work. If you’re going to try a new technique, don’t do it in the only copy of your important workbook
In fact, we’d suggest using made-up data only while practising your new Excel techniques. Working with real data makes it much harder to get help, because you can’t share your work with anyone

References

every cell in Excel has a reference
that’s effectively the address of the cell
references look like this: E7
- E refers to a vertical column
- 7 to a horizontal row

Data entry

let’s add some data…
we can type into the cells
that data appears in the formula bar too

An example: island populations

The national records of Scotland has public data on island populations
make three headings in row 1: island, males, females

Values

let’s add some values from the island populations data:

island	males	females
Argyll Islands	4427	4052
Arran, Bute and the Cumbraes	6218	5716
Highland Islands	5415	5249
Lewis and Harris, Great Bernera and Scalpay	10166	10006
Orkney - Mainland and connected	9862	9450

Tidy data

keep things consistent - spelling, case, formats, etc
- one piece of data per cell
- one instance per row (one island per row)
- one variable per column (a column of male counts, and and a column of female)

Tables

we can convert this group of cells into a proper table
click in one of your cells of data
Insert > Table (or Ctrl + T)
click OK

Lots of new things to see

Autofill

we’ll add a formula to calculate the total population
add a new column called total
paste or type = B2 + C2 into the first cell of that new column
- and look out for our session on formulas…
double-click the green fill handle to fill the rest of the column

Formatting

we can change the way that our spreadsheet looks
we can also change the way our values look

Cell formatting

some examples
- highlighting
- bold
- borders

Number formatting

we can format the numbers in our sheet to change their appearance
we’ll demonstrate some examples during the session where we make our values work as percentages, currency, dates, etc
that’s done using the number formatting area of the ribbon menu

Conditional formatting

we can also format based on values
take care though - this can be both ugly, and inaccessible