Before you teach your students to use Excel, you'll need to learn the basics of this great program. The first lesson will start off by going over some of the terms most commonly used in Excel, and then it will take a tour through the various features of an Excel workbook to get you acquainted with the look and feel of the application. You'll learn easy ways to move your cell pointer around within the Excel workspace, as well as a few keyboard shortcuts that will help you move to where the action is a little more quickly. At the end of this first lesson, you'll get to try your hand at creating your first Excel formula.

In this lesson, you're going to create your first worksheet! This lesson will start by going over the five steps you'll need to follow to create a worksheet in Excel: Stating your objective, adding labels, adding numbers, adding formulas, and changing the overall look of the worksheet using pre-designed templates. This lesson will also begin its ongoing discussion about ways you can use Excel in your classroom to improve student learning across your curriculum.

In this lesson you'll learn some valuable techniques that will help you save a lot of time while using Excel. The first and the best technique is called Auto Fill, and will be of a great use to you! Excel's Auto Fill allows you to enter a series of numbers, dates, or other values into your worksheets as quickly as you can click and drag your mouse. You'll practice using it to enter some of Excel's standard lists (months of the year, days of the week), and then this lesson will go over how to create custom Auto Fill lists to help you enter text that you need to enter often—like the names of your students. After that, this lesson will go over some of Excel's advanced formatting options to make your numbers appear as currency, percents, or carried out to various decimal places.

A picture is worth a thousand words! And when it comes to worksheets full of complex data calculations, that old saying is even more true. In this lesson, you'll learn how to use Excel's handy Chart Wizard to display the data you've entered in colorful charts that give meaning to your numbers. After taking a look at a few of Excel's many chart styles, you'll practice adding defining information to your charts, such as titles, data labels, and legends. Then this lesson will go over how to customize the colors of your chart. This lesson will finish with a discussion on the many ways you can use charting and graphing tools across your curriculum.

In this lesson, continuing the two-part discussion on Excel's Chart Wizard, you'll go over advanced charting techniques. You'll learn how to use the wizard to change chart types, add text, add shapes, and even add your own pictures to your charts. Then this lesson will take a tour of the Drawing toolbar, where you'll find the tools you need to add lines, arrows, and other helpful graphic features to your charts. And, as with most lessons in this course, this lesson will give you more lesson plan ideas that you can use to bring these Excel techniques into your own classroom.

In this lesson you're going to take a break from the step-by-step Excel instruction to visualize how it will look when you begin using this valuable program in your own classroom, no matter what grade level you teach. This lesson is going to review three teacher-created lesson plans for grades 1-4, 5-8, and 9-12 and then it will talk about ways you can adjust these lesson plans for different age groups, different content areas, and different learning styles and needs.

In this lesson, you'll find out how to turn any old worksheet into a database. Because once you're working with a database, you'll gain access to one of Excel's most helpful features: The Data menu. Through this menu, you'll be able to easily locate, organize, and summarize the information you need. You'll practice using it with a sample database, and then this lesson will explore Excel's AutoFilter, AutoSum, and Sort features. With these tools, you'll be able to quickly sort and group your students for differentiated instruction.

In this lesson, you'll learn about the three different types of cell references that you can incorporate into a formula, and this lesson will explain when you should use each one. This is great information if you plan to use Excel to help you maintain a budget for your classroom, or if you're teaching a lesson on money and budgets!

Now that you know all the ins and outs of creating one worksheet, it's time to increase the difficulty factor, and really organize your classroom! In this lesson, you're going to learn how to use sheet references to create three-dimensional workbooks, linking different worksheets so that the linked information updates automatically. This can be really helpful if you want to create monthly or quarterly grade books, and then compile all that information into one end-of-year grade summary for each of your students. This lesson will also discuss ways you can use linked workbooks in cooperative learning projects with your students.

Remember statistics class in high school? It wasn't the easiest class, but now that you're a teacher, you know how important statistics are when you're trying to evaluate your students' assessment scores. Excel to the rescue! This lesson is going to go over the basics of statistics in Excel. You'll learn how to use functions to simplify the process of calculating averages, deviations, minimums, maximums, modes, and more. This lesson will also discuss how these tools can help you target your students' strengths and areas of need.

This lesson is all about saving you time. It will go over how to use macros to automate all your tedious tasks in Excel, and then this lesson will show you how to build a macro of your very own. You'll also learn how to add time-saving buttons to the toolbars at the top of your screen. And this lesson will talk about ways you can customize those toolbars to better meet your needs.