1.1 Discuss course style - Video Tutorials & Practice Problems

<v Instructor>In this course,</v> we will teach you how to use Excel efficiently and effectively in a hands-on manner so that you can more easily manage business process, such as sales, commissions, time tracking, invoicing, vacation tracking, budgeting and forecasting, and many more. To manage these processes, we often follow a consistent pattern. Let's use an invoice management process as an example. Here, we first must import data. Maybe we need to get timesheet data into Excel from a time tracking system. Next we add in hourly rates, so we can determine the amounts to bill. And this amounts to data entry in some form or fashion. Next, we may or may not want to do some data validation, answering such questions as, did we enter too many hours or not enough, does this invoice seem reasonable. And this is data preparation. Next, with the above steps completed, we can generate timely and accurate invoices that we are confident in. And this is reporting. And last but not least, we need to distribute the invoices to our clients. And here we will talk about distribution methods. And thinking about the whole picture now, we may use the invoice management process spreadsheet to track when invoices are due and if they are paid or not. There is a whole lot more we can do here, but let's keep the example simple to start.