Microsoft Excel Fundamentals for Employment

Overview

Excel can look busy and a little intimidating: a giant grid and a wall of buttons. The good news is that almost everything you will ever use lives in a handful of named areas, and once you can name them, the rest starts to make sense. This course is built to get you there, gently and at the keyboard.

Over four sessions you will learn the foundations that cover most everyday spreadsheet work: entering and tidying data, writing simple formulas, making a sheet clear and readable, turning numbers into a chart, sorting and filtering a list, and saving and printing sensibly. Every example is the kind of thing a workplace actually uses, a budget, a stock list, a roster, a contact list, so the skills transfer straight to the job.

You cannot break Excel by having a go. Nearly everything can be undone with Ctrl + Z. The fastest way to learn a spreadsheet is to click around in one.

Who It's For

Beginners, and anyone who wants to tidy up skills they half-remember. No prior Excel experience is assumed beyond basic comfort with a computer: using a mouse and keyboard, and opening and saving files. It suits people heading into administration, retail, community services, and remote-community roles, where keeping a simple list, budget, or roster in a spreadsheet is part of the work.

The language is kept plain and free of jargon. Where a spreadsheet word is unavoidable, it is explained in everyday terms the first time it appears, and there is a plain-English glossary you can keep.

How It Runs

Four hands-on sessions, three hours each. You learn by doing: the trainer demonstrates a skill, then you try it on a practice workbook on your own screen. Each session builds on the one before, from finding your way around, to formulas, to formatting and charts, and finally to working with lists and sharing your work.

Everything you need comes as a download. Each session has a full Word handout that mirrors the whole session, so you can take no notes and still keep everything, plus a blank "starter" workbook to practise in and a finished "solution" workbook to check your work against. Because it all downloads, the course can be delivered and revisited completely offline, with no website needed on the day.

What You'll Work With

The practice files use everyday, work-ready scenarios rather than made-up data, so every skill lands on something familiar:

• A contact list for an office or community service, to practise data entry, sorting and filtering.
• Dave's T-Shirt Shoppe, a small retail stock list, to work out profit with a simple formula.
• A weekly budget and expense tracker, to add up totals and find the average, biggest and smallest.
• An attendance and work-hours roster, to record hours and total them.
• A stock or inventory list, to format clearly, chart, and tidy with dropdowns.
• An events register of Territory suburbs and people, to sort, filter and report on.

Why These Four Sessions

Session 1 sets the foundation: naming the parts of the Excel window, moving around, entering text, numbers and dates, speeding up typing with AutoFill, and saving your work where you can find it.

Session 2 is the heart of a spreadsheet: writing simple formulas with + - * /, the order Excel does the maths in, and the five everyday functions, SUM, AVERAGE, COUNT, MAX and MIN.

Session 3 makes a sheet clear and shareable: fonts, colours, borders, number formats like currency and percentage, and turning a table of numbers into the right kind of chart.

Session 4 is about working with lists and sharing your work: sorting, filtering, tidy dropdown lists, then printing a clean report, with a short look at where to go next.

The Sessions

What You'll Take Away

The confidence to open a spreadsheet, name what you are looking at, and move around without feeling lost.

The ability to enter data cleanly, write a simple formula, and use the five everyday functions to answer most questions a column of numbers will ever ask.

An eye for a clear sheet: sensible formatting, the right number format, and a chart that makes one point well.

The everyday list skills, sorting, filtering and dropdowns, plus saving, naming and printing your work so you can find it and share it.

A full set of take-home resources: a complete Word handout per session, quick-reference cards, practice workbooks, and a plain-English glossary, all yours to keep and use offline.

Resources

Every session has a full take-home handout and a one-page quick-reference card, both in Word so you can print them or keep them on a USB stick. There is also a plain-English glossary of Excel words, a guide to asking Copilot for help, and a single card of the keyboard shortcuts and functions worth knowing. Each session page also links its own handout and practice workbooks.

References

Quick-reference cards

Practice workbooks

Each session comes with a blank "starter" workbook to practise in and a finished "solution" to check your work against. The starters are also linked from each session page.