I'm teaching an afterschool program for high schoolers that's called Excel Gurus and wondering what you think I should make sure not to miss? It's introductory, but most students have used it before in SOME capacity of course.

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Good answers so far. Embedded if functions? Conditional formatting? Text formatting, esp text to columns. Paste special, Transpose.

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All of the above honestly. Some will gravitate towards different things. The topics are kind of endless when you think about practical applications.

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How to QA / validate their work. It's very easy to miss things in complex formulae. Planning ahead and keeping quality checks in mind when building anything is crucial.

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VLOOKUPs and Pivot Tables. I can't tell you how many times I've explained them to others in the work force. Also encourage them to play around and create their own formulas.

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Anything that isn’t using pointers is borderline criminal. There is only one exceptable case I have found for a lookup in favor of indexing

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Don’t forget the newer calculations! xlookup & ifs are my two go tos that are often forgotten about because of vlookup and if

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Same!

Make sure they know how to set up a basic table so they can effectively use pivots

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Also, good work

Don’t underestimate the importance of structure, formatting, and documentation! I will also echo the need for a focus on quality checks and troubleshooting. With new AI tools, anyone can write a complex formula, but finding someone that is able to fix a broken worksheet and build a worksheet that people actually want to use is so difficult these days.

I used to give an excel test to job applicants and I would weight formatting, structure, and a documented problem solving process more than just getting the right answer. I can teach people the right formulas to use, the other stuff takes years of reinforcement to stick.

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Very true! If they learn the basics of how Excel works the rest will come easy.

Some pretty easy ones are Goal seek, index match, sumifs, left right mid and using & to combine text

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Yes, shortcuts! Those are so essential, especially auto fill shortcuts.

It's been said elsewhere, but I have to second the idea of Pivot Tables. Amazon, for instance, really likes them.

Depending on how well your students are doing, teaching them the APIs to get data in an out of a sheet would be highly useful.
Network effects.

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Excel Solver

Vloock ups and pivot tables !!!!!!!

I’d add some focus on data visualizations and data storytelling.

Named tables, particularly after teaching lookups. That way you can show how nice is it to go from writing Sheet1!A:A to TableName[ColumnName] when writing a lookup.

There are many programs that are free or cheap especially in am education setting, get the kids an excel certification for their resumes, these programs are usually pretty well structured and you can add what you think is useful, but missed by the class.

Filters & sorting, how to convert a range to a table and vice versa

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