Basic skills to use a spreadsheet software

July 28, 2008 at 1:39 pm | In Data manipulation | 1 Comment

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Two students of social sciences who had so far used computers for limited, specific tasks recently asked me for some kind of a course outline that they should cover to pick up basic skills for using a spreadsheet software. I prepared the list and thought it may interest some others. Hence this post.

1. Basic structure of a spreadsheet and basic operations
* Navigation
* inserting and removing columns/rows
* cut-copy-paste
* paste special
* paste into word processor
* exporting and importing data to/from other formats
* other binary formats
* ascii/text/csv
** importing/exporting fixed width data
** importing/exporting delimited files
* text-to-columns
2. Use of formulae
* How to write formulae
* $ notation
* Cut-copy-paste formulae
3. Statistical and other functions
* sum,min,max,average, median, mode, range, stdev, correlation, ttest
* Data analysis functions: descriptive statistics,regression, anova
* other functions: concatenate, value, round, int
* How to search for functions
4. Graphs
* How to make different types of graphs
* Adding/removing a series
* Modifying other attributes of graph: scale, line types, titles, legend
5. Sorting
* Single variable
* Multiple variables
* Dangers of sorting
6. Pivot tables

If you find this list useful, do leave a note. Also, please comment if you have any suggestions to add to this list.

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