Course Information
Course Title: Advanced Excel I (Laptop Computer Required)
Categories: 1 - Data Analysis
2 - Data Management
Instructor(s): Robert de Levie Course Number: 40
Affiliation: Bowdoin College
Course Date: 03/10/2012 - Saturday Course Length: 1 Day Course
Start Time: 08:30 AM End Time: 05:00 PM
Fee: $455 ($655 after 2/13/12) Textbook Fee: $50 (Same text for Courses 41, 42)

Course Description
Part of the flexibility of Excel is due to its excellent facilities for writing, debugging, and using custom functions and macros. This allows you to write the precise programs you need to solve your problems more efficiently, or to write programs that others in your organization or field can use. Students should bring their own laptop computers.

Target Audience
The course will benefit industrial and academic researchers who want to adapt Excel to better suit their individual or corporate data analysis needs. Course prerequisite: prior experience with Excel.

Course Outline
Survey: What can functions do?
Practice session: write your own functions
Survey: the structure of VBA 
Practice session: write your own functions
Survey: testing and debugging
Practice session: testing and debugging
Survey: incorporating existing code
Practice session: incorporating existing code

This course will teach you how to write functions, using VBA, the language of Excel’s user-defined routines.  You will also learn how to incorporate free, open-access third-party functions that can be used to greatly increase the power and accuracy of your spreadsheet calculations, and can make Excel fully equivalent to some of the more specialized and more difficult-to-learn higher-level languages. 

This is a hands-on course, with most of the time devoted to practical exercises. Students should bring their own laptop computers, and all pre-registered students will be informed by the instructor well ahead of the course what Microsoft and additional free software tools to load. Students will get pdf copies of the PowerPoint slides used, and therefore will be able to concentrate on the practical exercises rather than on taking notes.

Course Instructor's Biography
Professor de Levie has taught analytical chemistry at Georgetown University for 34 years. His 2008 book on Advanced Excel for scientific data analysis has been very well received. His website, http://www.bowdoin.edu/~rdelevie/excellaneous, provides many freely downloadable Excel macros for scientific data analysis, many of which will be used in this course.