Excel first steps

excel
beginner
Excel for beginners
Published

June 30, 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:

KIND Excel beginner’s skill tree

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
  • Great session learnt few tricks even tho I’m working with excel for the past 15 years!
  • Good understanding of what excel doesn’t like (eg Day of week or space before date).
  • Straight forward training session. Nice and easy to follow. I use Excel every day

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

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 opening Excel on the Desktop
  • you’ll need to create a new blank workbook Create a new blank workbook

Opening Excel (web)

Interface

Excel interface

Central idea

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

Save, close, open

File menuSave as

  • 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 - like its address
  • references look like this: E7
    example references
    • E refers to a vertical column
    • 7 to a horizontal row

Data entry

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

An example: school holidays

Values

  • let’s add some values from the school holiday dates
  • name of holiday
  • start date
  • end date
    • dates usually go DD/MM/YYYY
    • as we’ll see, Excel does lots of helping when we enter dates…
    • …😱
  • we’ll only need a few rows of data

name start_date end_date Mid-term holidays 14/10/2024 18/10/2024 In service day 21/10/2024 21/10/2024 St Andrew’s Day 02/12/2024 02/12/2024

Tidy data

  • keep things consistent - spelling, case, formats, etc
    • one piece of data per cell
    • one instance per row (one school holiday per row)
    • one variable per column (a column of names, one of start dates…)

Tables

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

Lots of new things to see

Table features

Autofill

  • we’ll add a formula to calculate how long our holidays are
  • add a new column called days
  • paste = 1 + (C2 - B2) 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 fill handle

Formatting

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

Cell formatting

  • some examples Formatting area
    • highlighting
    • bold
    • borders

Number formatting

  • our dates are number formatted
  • Excel dates are actually numbers (like 45583) formatted to look like dates
  • 1900 dates!
  • percentages, £, …

Conditional formatting

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