Introduction
Microsoft Excel is one of the most widely used tools for organizing, analyzing, and visualizing data. Whether you’re tracking personal expenses, managing small business records, or handling school projects, Excel can make complex tasks simple and efficient.
- Even if you’ve never used Excel before, learning the basics will help you:
- Organize information clearly and efficiently
- Automate calculations to save time
- Visualize data with charts and tables
- Build a foundation for advanced tools like PivotTables and dashboards
This tutorial will guide you through the core features of Excel in a beginner-friendly, step-by-step approach. By the end, you’ll be comfortable working with data in Excel and ready to explore more advanced topics.
this is the dataset that were going to use
this is the dataset before formatting
Preliminary Step: Ensure All Data is Visible
Before diving into Excel, make sure every piece of information is fully readable. Columns should be wide enough so that text doesn’t spill over into neighboring cells, and headers should be clear and distinct. This prevents confusion when entering formulas, sorting data, or creating charts.
How to do it:
click between 1 and A to highlight the whole dataset the go to formats and select AutoFit column width click
your dataset should look like this with spaced columns and width
You also need to freeze your top row and your first column by going to D2 go to view-freeze panes-click the drop down then freeze panes
Why this step matters:
Making sure all information is visible and easy to read avoids mistakes later when you apply formatting, formulas, or create charts. Think of it as setting up a clean workspace before starting any project.
Salary Formatting
Select the Salary column.
Go to Home → Number → Currency.
Your results should look like this.
Date Formatting
Select the Joining Date column.
Go to Home → Number → Short Date.
Simple Formulas
Sum of Salaries: =SUM(E2:E877) → total payroll
Average Salary: =AVERAGE(E2:E877) → average employee pay
Maximum Salary: =MAX(E2:E877) → identify highest-paid employee
Conditional Formatting
Highlight salaries above 100,000.
Highlight cell under home go to conditional formatting, you will see greater than then you write 100,000 enter.
Highlight employees joined before 2020
Using IF Statements
Identify high-salary employees
=IF(E2>100000, "High", "Normal")
so you create a new cell between salary and hire date and name it, after getting the answer in E2 autofill the column to see for the rest.
Lookup Example (VLOOKUP/XLOOKUP)
Scenario: Find department of a specific employee
=VLOOKUP("Williams",C2:D877,2,FALSE)
SUMIF / SUMIFS Example
Total salary by department:
=SUMIF(D2:D877,"Sales",E2:E877)
Total salary of all employees in Sales department AND Office Location = Nairobi (for example).
=SUMIFS(E2:E877,D2:D877,"Sales",Q2:Q877,"Nairobi")
Creating pivot table
Here click anywhere in your Dataset under insert go to pivot tables click new worksheet
Creating pivot table
i also created a Donut chart of average salary by department
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