Al Chen

Excel for the Real World: Gain the Basic Skills of Microsoft Excel

hey ,i want to know what is the third column and 4 the column stand 4.

I looked at this in greater detail, and the Income Estimate is definitely a very accurate way of showing your income potential forecasted out for the entire year! More people should do this to get a better sense of their "financial lives" to better plan for the future.  In particular, I like how you found the average per week for your earnings by using the AVERAGE() formula across your weekly earnings. This gives you a good way to forecast your annual income. On the budget sheet, the font colors of your numbers in columns D and E are exactly what advanced financial analysts use! Using blue to indicate a hard-coded number and black to show formulas helps the end reader of your spreadsheet understand what you entered directly into the spreadsheet vs. what numbers are calculations. Using green in cell H5 to indicate the number came from another spreadsheet is also great. It looks like you started entering in your daily earnings and expenses on the last spreadsheet which is definitely next level! This will give you a pretty accurate picture of your expenses and earnings to forecast for the year. If you plan on using this spreadsheet to enter in your data, it might get pretty cumbersome since you have to use the spreadsheet every day to enter in your earnings and expenses. While this is totally doable, I might recommend using a better tool like Google Spreadsheets (if you are planning on sharing your spreadsheet with someone else to enter in their earnings/expenses) or Mint.com (a personal budgeting tool). Excel is great for helping you get a snapshot of your expenses and income, but if you're serious about financial planning, take a look at some other free tools out there!

 Thanks for looking at my project in detail Al! I know its going to be a pain to add expenses for the month, and I know I'll end up leaving some things out, but I'm gonna give it a try anyway. I do use mint as well, but it can't always accurately categorize my expenses (and I don't always check it) also my boyfriend and I pay in cash often- which mint obviously doesn't account for. I'll definitely look into Google Spreadsheets BUT I have a feeling I'm going to be the only one entering data :P. 

   On a different note, my main motivation for learning excel is that It was one thing I was weak on during my internship for a Brooklyn-based fashion designer. Her 'Tech-Packs' were all in Excel format. It ended up taking me so much time to work on them because I did not have a good grasp on using excel! As I'm trying to get a new job in the industry again, I'm working on these things so in the next interview I get I can confidently say I know how to use the program. This course, and the photo shop course (shoutout to Meg Lewis) have been really great on Skillshare so far!

Gotcha, best of luck with the data entering! I think the more you use Excel with your budgeting tool the better you'll get at it. I use Mint religiously and when I pay in cash I just have to mentally remember to enter it into Mint (there's a way to manually add in transactions).


This looks great Samantha! If you would like me to review your project in more detail, send me your Excel file to al@thekeycuts.com if you'd like!

<img class="zoomable rounded-image-wrapper" src="https://static.skillshare.com/cdn-cgi/image/quality=80,width=1000,format=auto/uploads/project/ae377f8055c8ffe2928cfda8573060f4/52f91dcd" alt="Our Budget - image 1 - student project" srcset="https://static.skillshare.com/cdn-cgi/image/quality=80,width=600,format=auto/uploads/project/ae377f8055c8ffe2928cfda8573060f4/52f91dcd 600w, https://static.skillshare.com/cdn-cgi/image/quality=80,width=1000,format=auto/uploads/project/ae377f8055c8ffe2928cfda8573060f4/52f91dcd 1000w" sizes="(max-width: 600px) 600px, 100vw" loading="lazy">
Who knew entering Data could be kinda fun?
Thanks for the great tutorial! Looking forward to the next class. This one was very helpful!

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