Beginning Excel 2010 Syllabus for 5 Week Course

Excel is one of those programs I didn't truly understand until I was asked to teach Beginning Excel--the basics.

At first, I was terrified. I had used Excel a lot. Almost every day. I am the Budget Queen, so I used Excel to track all my expenses and felt that didn't qualify me to teach. But a lot of people had faith in me. So, I said I'd do it.

Thankfully, my advisers provide me with every necessary tool to be successful at my job. I am a HUGE, HUGE fan of Labyrinth Learning. They have great books and I won't teach a class unless I get to pick from their selection. I have yet to use their Teacher Edition. I create all of my lesson plans from the same book my students use. If I don't know how to do something, I spend the hours searching and trying to find the answer on my own. The harder I work for the answer, the better prepared I am to teach it.

For my beginning class, I chose Labyrinth's Microsoft Excel 2010: Level 1. It comes with 6 lesson plans that I condensed into a 5 week course.

After each lesson, I have the students work on their own for 30 minutes. I have them download the Student Data Files to get more comfortable with the content we cover.

When I receive a book, the first thing I do is plan out the overview of my syllabus. Here is the syllabus for Excel Level 1:

Week 1 (~2 hours): The Basics

• Locate and open the program
• Excel Layout - Home tab, columns vs. rows

Week 2 (~2 hours): The Worksheet

• Selecting cells and ranges
• Cut, Copy, and Paste
• Undo and Redo

Week 3 (~2 hours): Changing the Appearance of Worksheets

• Printing worksheets
• Editing workbook properties
• Modifying columns and rows

Week 4 (~2 hours): Working with Formulas and Functions

• Creating formulas
• Cell references
• Modifying and copying formulas
• Using Insert Function

Week 5 (~2 hours): Format

• Formatting numbers 
• Creating charts

In the next couple of weeks, I will post each lesson in-depth and then do the same for Intermediate and Advanced Excel 2010. 

If you have any questions, leave them in the comments below.

Happy Teaching!
Jessica