How to Use Microsoft® Excel® The Careers in Practice Series

Abstract

How to Use Microsoft® Excel® The Careers in Practice Series is an textbook appropriate for a course covering Microsoft Excel at a beginner to intermediate level. It is geared toward and will be accommodating for students and instructors with little to no experience in using Microsoft Excel. However, the approach is not at the expense of relevance. How to Use Microsoft® Excel® The Careers in Practice Series approaches Excel from the perspective of making personal and professional quantitative decisions. Personal decisions include big purchases such as homes and automobiles, savings for retirement, and personal budgets. Professional decisions include budgets for managing expenses, merchandise items to markdown or discontinue, and inventory management. Students are given clear, easy to follow instructions for each skill presented. They are also provided with opportunities to learn additional skills related to the personal or professional objectives presented. For example, students will learn the key terms with respect to home mortgages and understand the impact interest rates have on monthly mortgage payments. This text also places an emphasis on “what if” scenarios so students gain an appreciation for the computational power of Excel. Each chapter in How to Use Microsoft® Excel® The Careers in Practice Series has a theme for a specific career or field. An example, or objective, is developed within the theme for each chapter. The objectives are designed to answer key questions or provide insights for decisions that were presented in the theme. Students are instructed to open a follow along file at the beginning of each section and will learn how multiple skills are used together to accomplish an objective. To help students retain what they learn in your course, and refresh their memory about what they don't, lesson videos are provided to walk the student through each skill in the chapter. The lesson videos are broken down by skill so students can target their viewing to material where they need additional help. This feature will be available for courses starting in Fall of 2012. Within each objective, students learn to execute specific skills. Breaking the objectives down by skills allows students to focus on each skill and instructors to identify where students are having difficulty. This also makes it possible for students and instructors to go back and research specific skills they need to review or reference at a future point in time. Refresher boxes are available to students after each objective and contain an abbreviated list of steps presented for each skill. Additionally, for courses starting in Fall of 2012, each refresher box will have a link to a short demonstration video (this is in addition to the lesson videos), providing students with the option to see a quick demonstration of a skill. Chapter 1: Fundamental Skills. Chapter 2: Mathematical Computations. Chapter 3: Logical and Lookup Functions. Chapter 4: Presenting Data with Charts.