Excel first steps (Excel for beginners session 1)

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:

• Excel first steps (this session)
• Tidy data in Excel
• References and names in Excel
• Excel formatting
• Excel tables
• Excel formulas

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:

KIND Excel 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

NoteThree random comments from previous attendees

• I’ve been using excel for many years without any formal training; this session was very basic but it was good to underline this and I picked up one or two tips. Looking forward to attending the run of sessions.
• Great host. American Dates did my head in!
• Session was very informative and useful, it will be great to build up excel skills over the next few weeks

TipForthcoming 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

Excel 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

Table features

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