What you should know before watching this course

You don't have to be an excel guru or a powerpoint power user to take this course. But they are a few prerequisites. In Microsoft excel, you should know how to create and save a workbook. You should know how to format cells, basic text formatting, but also numeric formatting. And cell formatting, with things like borders and shading. You should feel comfortable selecting, copying, and pasting cells and ranges of cells. You should know how to sort and filter data so that you can select a set of data and present it to your audience in an order that they would best understand it in.

And you should know how to create basic charts, whether it's a pie chart, a line or a column chart. Any of those charts, if you're comfortable creating those, and with the other scales you see on the screen here, you're going to be fine in Excel. Now let's take a look at Powerpoint. In Powerpoint, you need to be able to create a basic presentation with text on slides. You then need to be able to apply some kind of a design, what we might have called a theme or a template in some versions of Powerpoint. To the presentation as a whole.

You need to be able to insert objects, you need to know how to put a picture on a slide for example or smart art or a chart. If you know how to insert any of these objects, you're fine. And then you need to know how to animate either text or an object. If you know how to make your words fly onto the screen or you know how to have a picture appear, or disappear, then you're all set. And you should be very comfortable copying and pasting objects and text from one slide to another, the same way that you'd copy and paste text inside of Microsoft Word, for example.

So those are the sets of skills that you'll need to have for Excel and PowerPoint. Because I'll be showing you these things, but we won't be teaching them individually. So what if you need to know more, well if you need to know more about Excel. Go to the lynda.com training library, and you will find there an essential training course for excel 2013, or 2010, 2007, whatever version you're using. And the same for PowerPoint. The Lynda.com training library has what you'll need to know to be able to take this course and feel really successful creating data driven presentations with Excel and PowerPoint.