Free Excel Crash Course for Data Science Beginners: A Sneak Peek at My Slides

Tomorrow is the big day when I will be taking my intro to data science course and yet, I have not prepared myself to teach this course. I am the kind of person who loves making use of slides as a guide when teaching rather than explaining everything straight from my head. The reason why I prefer this method is that when I teach off hand, I may not remember all the important topics or areas to cover and I may end up being less coordinated and unprepared at the end of the day.

But with slides, I can follow through what I have written there. This gives me a structure to follow and makes life easier for me. Apart from making life easier for me, it does the same for the students, as it would make it easier for them to follow through with me as they see the engaging visuals on the slides.

Regarding my slides, I prefer making them myself. The time spent in making them gives me pleasure and solidified my understanding as I gather the information, which eventually makes it easier to explain certain concepts.

I just started making my slides on Canva for an Introductory Class on Excel, in which I will be sharing the few pages I have already designed out with the public access view to watch through what I have done.

I started by making the cover page. I did some manipulation on a sample presentation slide on Canva to get these results.

I went on to introduce myself in the next slide, give them a warm welcome message and to let them have an idea of what I would be teaching them on Excel.

And for this course, which I have planned to take for a maximum of 1 hour and 30 minutes, I will be treating 5 different topics alone, which are: Introduction to Excel, Basic Excel Operations, Data Manipulation, Working with Formulas and Functions and Data Visualisation.

I believe, having gone through these topics, they will be able to see themselves as intermediate levels when it comes to working with Excel for data science.

I started the slide by giving a brief introduction to what Excel can be used for and the range of features it has.

Next, I would be helping them install excel package on their computers from Microsoft Office 2021. I have earlier written a post here on how to get Microsoft Office 2021 for free from Microsoft Website itself, which is not a Cracked Version, and yet gives you access to all its available features. You can check out that post here.

Next, I move on explaining the basic terms used in Excel to get them accustomed with the Excel Interface. At this point, I will be explaining these terms while they have their Microsoft Excel application opened up so they can easily follow through on my explanation.

I had to make some arrow pointers to describe several sections in the excel worksheet. This is necessary so as not to get anyone confused when I call a term or explain a process.

Then we move on to the section where I will explain some terms regarding entering data into cells and basic arithmetic operations. I will be explaining how they can perform this by switching over to my Excel application and showing them some samples.

This is where I am currently in making the slides. I am yet to be done, and I know how busy I would be considering I have 3 more slides to make, one for MySQL, one for PowerBI, and one for Python. I don't know how I can do this in the few hours remaining but when I do, I will make a video for each of these slides.