I love online courses so much that this week I even took one on… Excel.
“WAIT, WHAT? You? The person who’s been talking about how much they hate Excel all these years? You took an entire course on it?”
Yes, indeed, anything really can happen! Even more incredibly, after this mini training course, I actually learned to like Excel. I still don’t understand why some clients use it instead of a Word file for plain and simple text, but that’s a topic for another day.
Let’s start with a little introduction to the course (available in French): It says it takes six hours to complete, but I’d table just two or three for most learners (Get it? Because Excel uses tables…😊). As it’s aimed at complete beginners and even explains how to open Excel and save a file, I was able to skip the first part and go straight on to the more technical bits.
To put my new skills into practice, I created a small file and, although it’s far from finished, I couldn’t resist sharing the first version—you can download it using the link below if you’re interested.
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Open in new tab As I’m still just learning, for the moment I’ve made four separate sheets for each calculation I’m interested in:
- The first calculates a monthly income based on the number of words translated per day, the number of days worked per month and the rate per word. You can play around with the different elements to see what impact they have on the monthly salary.
- The second works out the rate per word required for a target gross monthly income based on the number of words translated per day, etc.
- The third sheet shows how many words you would need to translate per day to achieve a target monthly income based on your rate per word, etc. The aim is to see if it seems feasible or if something needs to change (the rate per word or the number of days’ work per month, for example).
- Finally, you can use the last sheet to either set an hourly rate or estimate the monthly income associated with an hourly rate for projects where an hourly rate is required by the client.
I’m sure there’s an easier way to do it. Ideally, I would have just made one table where all the cells were logically connected so that making a change in one cell automatically changed all the other cells related to it, but I couldn’t work out how to do that… I’ll get there eventually though!
My plan is to keep developing my Excel skills, so I will share any other files I make that might be of use to you.
And I promise to try and make the layout a little better next time. I won’t lie, it wasn’t my priority this time round!
Feel free to leave a comment if you have any tips, suggestions (like calculations that would be useful to you) or thoughts you’d like to share.
This is a translation of one of my French articles (“Formation Excel gratuite et outil fait maison !“), kindly provided by the amazing Georgie Scott from Cf Language Solutions!
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