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Nigel Harris takes a look at the latest tutorial produced by The Knowledge Base. Part of the AccountingWEB ProductivITy kit, the program aims to ensure accountants get the most from Excel, even those with limited time.
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It's all very well learning how to do clever stuff with Excel, such as pivot tables and macros, but most of us are too busy to learn techniques text book fashion. Recognising this, Simon Hurst of The Knowledge Base has devised a series of short Excel tutorials specifically to show accountants how and why to use some of the more advanced tools.
The 26-part series includes titles such as "the lunchtime pivot", advanced charts, designing more reliable spreadsheets, spreadsheet presentation and working with accounting data. Having avoided the black art of pivot tables with the same devotion with which I avoided ever watching the Sound of Music until this year, I bit the bullet and dipped into Simon's "Lunchtime Pivot."
The tutorial takes you step by step through the use of a pivot table, looking at the answers you can obtain, rather than concentrating on the technical aspects. Some of the tutorials in this series incorporate a table of data for you to copy and paste into a new Excel workbook. This one uses the Northwind.mdb sample data that comes with Microsoft Access to analyse marketing department and sales invoice details. A word of warning here. If, like me, you were given the 'typical' office installation when your PC was set up, you may well not have the Access sample files, nor some of the advanced Excel tools such as Microsoft Query which you will also need for this tutorial. Query is normally installed automatically when you first want to use it, but you need the Office CD ready to do so. However, you will probably find it easier to re-run MS Office setup and install those tools and any others which are marked as 'to be installed on first use'. The tutorial is downloaded as a 16 page Word document featuring plenty of well-placed, full colour screenshots. These are easy to read and many have been annotated to highlight relevant points. Although it uses Excel 2000, any Excel 97 variations are helpfully noted in red. No excuse is made for ignoring Office 95, but with 2000 being superceded now by Office XP this seems entirely reasonable. You might want to print the Word document or to have it open on your desktop as you work through it. A good quality colour printer will be best for this although the screen shots are legible when printed in black and white. I decided to work on screen and found it fairly easy to open the Word tutorial document and then lauch Excel and skip between the two (it is just about feasible to have both open on-screen in their own windows, but neither is then really big enough to use). This works well most of the time, but there were just a few occasions when I had to skip back and forth as I couldn't remember some longer sequences of menu steps from the tutorial. Luckily, Microsoft Query, which is likely to be quite foreign to users of this tutorial, runs in its own small box which you can easily float on top of the tutorial document, thus keeping both in view as you step through the data selection wizard. I found this tutorial easy to use, each step was fully explained and virtually every menu and wizard page is illustrated with a screen shot which you can compare with your own spreadsheet. Why not buy a Microsoft Press book instead? Because these tutorials are devoted specifically to practical tools for accountants and written by someone who understands how most of use use Excel. This practical, bite-sized approach meant half an hour really was well-spent. U kunt de Excel ProductivITy Kit hier bestellen
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