Excel

From Reporting Cookbook: www.forjournalists.com/cookbook

[edit] The basics

• Using formulas
• Ranking in Excel

[edit] Advanced Excel

• Date Functions
  
• Text or string functions
  
• Text editing and manipulation with spreadsheets
  
• Logical functions
  
• Misc functions
  
• Lookup tables
  
• Custom lists
  

Most of the tricks listed in the above sections can be found on a tipsheet in the IRE Resource Center by MaryJo Sylwester called, "My Favorite (Excel) Things" from the NICAR 2006 conference.

[edit] Tips and Tricks

• How to determine the winner in a multi-candidate election

[edit] Excel Training

Download Chris Schnaars' four-part Excel training course that you can go through on your own or use to develop Excel training for your newsroom. The course includes dozens of screenshots and several practice datasets used in the course. The material starts easy enough for someone who has never used Excel and builds to an intermediate/advanced level. Updated 6/4/2008 (4.3 MB zipped download).

[edit] Useful add-ins

• ASAP Utilities

[edit] External links

• Pearson Software Consulting on extracting first and last names
• Pearson Software Consulting on parsing telephone numbers
• Excel Tips on separating names into individual columns
• Parsing names in Excel
• Microsoft on how to reverse the order of words in a text string
• Microsoft on using VBA to parse city, state and Zip codes into separate values
• Microsoft on how to use dates and times