Working with Excel on the iPad

Entering and Editing Data
In this module I'm going to teach you about entering data into cells. We'll look at the difference between text, numbers, and dates, and I'll show you a cool trick to solve a problem where you have numeric values that begin with a 0. I'll be showing you how to amend and delete the contents of a cell, and you'll also learn about a valuable, yet underused feature of Excel called Cell Comments. And finally, we'll look at three great ways to save time when entering data into Excel, Cut, Copy, and Fill.

Formatting Your Data
In this module we're going to focus on formatting, which is all about improving the appearance of a spreadsheet to make it easy to read and understand. You'll learn how to change the width of a column and the height of a row, how to insert and delete rows and columns within existing data, and how to hide rows and columns. Then I'll teach you about cell formatting. In addition to learning how to change the font, the size, and the color of cells, we'll look at changing the alignment of data in a cell and a how to change the way that numbers and dates are displayed. Even something simple like adding a separator character will make very large numbers easy to read. And you'll also learn about a couple of great time savers, copying formatting and cell styles.

Creating Formulas and Using Functions
Although it's perfectly possible to use Excel without ever creating a formula or using a function, if you don't, you're missing out on a huge part of the application's power. Formulas allow you to do things such as add up numbers, subtract one number from another, as well as divide and multiply. In this module you'll learn how to create formulas to do all of these things. You'll also learn about the importance of using brackets or parenthesis in formulas. And I'll show you what happens when you copy a formula and how sometimes you need to make a cell reference in a formula fixed or absolute, so that the formula copies correctly. Functions are like formulas except they're predefined and built into Excel. There's over 300 functions, and I'll show you a few of the basic, but useful ones. But let's start this module by looking at creating basic formulas.

Working with Lists
This section of the course is all about Working with Lists. This could be a list of numbers, a list of dates, a list of text entries, or a multicolumn list. Excel is perfect for manipulating lists of data. A list can be sorted, for example, a list of numbers can be sorted into highest to lowest order. You can apply a filter to a list, for example, show me a list of all the employees who are based in the New York office, and we'll look at sorting and filtering in this part of the course. More and more people are using Excel to work with data that's come from other sources, and a common issue with this kind of data is that it often needs to be tidied up and cleaned to make it useable, and you'll learn about some of the ways that you can do this. In this module I'll answer an often-asked question, how do I stop my list headings from disappearing as I scroll down the screen? And finally, you'll learn about the benefits of using tables. So with that, let's move on and look at sorting.

Visualize Your Data
They say a picture is worth a thousand words, and Excel is no exception to this. It's often easier to look at a chart or graph to interpret trends in a set of data than to look at a set of figures. In this module of the course, you'll learn how to create a column chart. I'll also show you the recommended charts feature. And finally, we'll look at the people graph, which allows you to display a set of data as a kind of infographic.

iPad-specific Features
In this module you'll learn how to connect your iPad to Dropbox and Box, two cloud-based file storage services. I'll also show you how to access your files when you have no internet connection, for example when you're on an airplane. And if you have iOS 9, that's the latest iPad operating system installed on your iPad, you can take advantage of the multitasking features, and I'll show you how to do that. Finally in this module, I'll demonstrate some of the limitations of using Excel on an iPad compared to Excel on a desktop computer.