Microsoft Excel
| Type | Team Size | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Collaborative Tools | Software | Personal Skills | Productivity Tools | 1 | 2-10 | 11-30 | 30+ |
What, Why & When
Getting Started
To get started, you’ll need a spreadsheet software. Here, we’re using Microsoft Excel because it’s the most widely used and the richest in features. If you're a member of Leuphana University, you can order a cheap Microsoft Office license here: [1](https://www.leuphana.de/services/miz/service-support/beschaffung/software/ms-office-365.html)
Most of the things we’re showing are also doable in Google Sheets or LibreOffice Calc, so if you prefer those, don’t worry. The software will look and feel a bit different, but the underlying ideas are the same.
As stated above, this article mainly revolves around a set of videos, which we link to below. All the content and explanations can be found there. Here, will only tell you the contents of the video and give accompanying information and resources so that you can a) choose which one is interesting to you and b) follow along (which we recommend you do, because that’s the only way you’ll learn).
Shortcuts
Okay, here's some very useful shortcuts, descendingly ordered by subjective importance.
| Shortcut | Keyboard Combination | Usage |
|---|---|---|
| Undo & Redo | CTRL + Z, CTRL + Y | The bread and butter shortcuts for everyone who messes up sometimes (which is everyone). This works in almost all software ever created by the way. |
| Copy Commands | CTRL + C, CTRL + X, CTRL + V | The C copies, the X cuts, and the V pastes. I hope you knew this already, but if you didn't, make use of it! |
| Fancy keyboard navigation | CTRL and Arrow Keys | Instead of trying to move your mouse exactly behind that word, try to get used to pushing your cursor around with the arrow keys. If you use CTRL and the arrow keys (to the ← left or the right →), you jump between words instead of letters. This works everywhere by the way. |
| Make heading | Alt + 1, Alt + 2, Alt + 3 | This makes the selected piece of text a level 1 heading. Can be used with 2 and 3 as well. Very useful for quickly structuring your document! |
| Show paragraphs and stuff | CTRL + Shift + * | This shortcut shows you linebreaks, tabs, pagebreaks and formatting. Very useful when you're trying to figure out why your document is a mess. |
| Page Break | CTRL + Enter | Inserts a pagebreak, saves you the trouble of inserting to many line breaks. |
Links & Further reading
Of course, our own video covers everything you need to know: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ItXOGe7kVhY
The author of this entry is Matteo Ramin.
