First, we'll learn about Styles. Styles can be used to store all kinds of information about a cell - font, format, colors, etc. One benefit of using styles is that when you change the style's settings, all of the cells in your sheet that have are formatted with that style all change. We'll learn how to use a lot of the existing styles, plus create our own. We'll also see how to merge (import) styles from another workbook.

Next we'll learn about Grouping and Outlining. You can use this feature to automatically group similar information together. For example, here's a sheet where we'll group all of the sales information together - then the expenses information.

You can expand and collapse the outline groups, add totals, and more.

We'll teach you how to group information together on multiple levels, including across the columns (notice the months grouped into quarters on this sheet).

I'm never one to rely on Excel to do everything for me (you just miss out on so much of the power!) so next we'll learn how to create manual grouping levels ourselves - with lots of cool tricks thrown in.

The next lesson is a whole bunch of Excel tips and tricks with respect to sorting, grouping, outlining, and lots more. For example, I'll teach you how to collapse a group (or two) and then select just the visible cells.

I'll show you how to put subtotals above a group so when you collapse the groups, things don't look wierd.

We'll make our very own sorting and grouping custom toolbar with all of the functions on it that's you're going to need (preventing you from having to dig in the menus every time).

Oh... and remember we worked with Styles earlier. You didn't believe me that they were useful. Here's an example. You've got a sheet with a Style defined for your headings (let's say in blue)...

Now make one little change to your style and your entire sheet is updated...

OK, now comes the cool lesson: Data Validation. Are people typing in what they're supposed to be typing in. I'll teach you how to make Excel yell at people when they don't fill in the right data into your sheet.

You can control the type of information that gets put into cells (text, numbers, etc.)

You can give custom prompts to the user...

...which show up right on your sheet.

Plus you can give custom error messages.

Plus here's a real cool one... I'll show you how to create a list that the user has to choose an option from!

We'll talk a little bit about data auditing just to see how it applies to data validation. We'll do a lot more with auditing in later lessons.

We'll learn some new text functions, like ISTEXT() and LEFT() and we'll see how they apply to checking data validation rules.

So once again we cover a whole bunch of new topics and new techniques to aid you in your data analysis tools. We're leading up to something big.... you'll find out what soon.... but you need to get these skills under your belt first. Don't miss this lesson.

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