In one of the jobs that I’m currently working, I was asked to run a training/Professional Learning session on Google Sheets. The not-for-profit organisation utilises the software in many different ways primarily for budgeting, but includes various accounting purposes and budget burndown tracking. Without understanding where the users Excel/Google Sheets literacy stood, I developed some training that would cover some general and broad skills that many people would use the software for. With my teaching background, I knew two things would happen:

1. I would need to swiftly gauge their Excel knowledge by asking very open, yet directed and poignant questions, and (classically),
2. We would run out of time for all topics that I would love to cover.

Prior to this training session that had been reserved, an additional (and prior) meeting ran over time, leaving the group with very little time remaining. I decided to pivot on my preparation and asked to briefly review their spreadsheet(s) and enact a learn by meaningful application approach. What I truly valued from my time in Teach for Australia’s Leadership Development Program was honing my adaptability skills.

Prior to my Economics degree, I came from the creative industries — Sound Design. During this degree, I forged skills in the studio, developed traditional (Western and non-Western) musical knowledge (written and aural), and developed various musical performance skills (digital and acoustic instruments). I’m used to being onstage and things not working. A guitar rig doesn’t make sound. I press play on the laptop and the screen goes black with nothing playing. All of these issues might trouble the novice user, but imagine standing in front of a crowd, waiting for you to entertain them. I learned to remain calm in these moments, which granted me fantastic talking points in class to draw upon should any of the tech had failed.

Being in the classroom taught me that it’s okay to move in another direction if your intended one, or the path you’re attempting to carve out, just isn’t working. At the beginning of the training session, I had already clocked how much time remained. I gauged the energy levels of my intended audience and decided to engage them in the learning closest to them — their actual work.

I started with expressing the intention of Excel and why we use it in the way we do, “we separate out all data points so that we can combine information from different cells and process them on an individual level. If we have a cell that contains both numbers and text, we have to perform some extra steps, making the job harder on ourselves.” Then we went onto some practical Excel basics. Really, I wanted to see if they could answer any of my questions or finish any of my sentences. This encompassed how to enter text into a cell, colour that text, next that cell, add borders, formatting based on cell attribute, e.g. financial, decimal points, etc, and even showing them the format painter.

Next, we moved onto some basic arithmetic, and provided visual evidence for why we separate numbers and text into different cells. This was also the time to showcase some cell selection efficiency methods and arithmetic formulas. Specifically, how to select multiple rows of data using your keyboard (shift, control/command, and arrow keys) insead of individually selecting each cell you want to add up. Moving from the individual cell addition method to showcasing SUM, the trainees already had awareness of the formulas, but were unsure about arrays and how to separate them (“is it a comma, semicolon, or period?”).

Finally, we moved onto the IF function, which I believe is a complementary function to arithmetics, as it is a really nice cause-and-effect activity that introduces a human-understandability of logic within these functions.I enjoy using those typical type of examples, such as weather (take the umbrella or not) and values around a certain number (>100 vs >=1000). Without being able to truly test for their understanding in this session (to the degree that I was hoping), I had developed homework training materials after the workshop for them to complete. There are many steps involved in this homework, yet is naturally scaffolded such that they will be able to open, share, and edit their spreadsheets in a manner that makes sense to them and their work colleagues.

This homework was essentially a recap of some skills that were learned in this training session, but allowed me to integrate some of their personalised interactions with one another and the spreadsheet, making it truly meaningful. I have decided to share only a portion of that training material, given that this is incredibly personalised to their practice. That said, these are the fundamental Excel/Google Sheets skills that can be learned in isolation in a YouTube video, but where’s the fun in that?

I’m interested to know — have you had to do any Excel/Google Sheets training in your workplace or for friends/family? How did it go? Were you nervous? Why? There’s definitely some things that I would have changed from what I did, and I would probably adapt it again after that next time. Leave your story/stories below as I’m genuinely interested in your journey.