Learning Conversations

I've often said to people that there's no point paying for training on Microsoft Office products. There's so much expertise available for free on the web.

Every so often, a product comes along to make me rethink that position.

Most of the advice and tutorials on the web about MS Excel are designed to walk you through the basics, or to answer specific questions. Much of it is very good - once you've found the right page for you. But most of it is purely showing and telling. Occasionally someone will create a simulation based on a screen-capture movie, where you can interact with different parts of the screen.

Where Excel Everest differs is that it uses Excel itself as the platform for teaching about Excel. You're taken through a progression of structured exercises, gradually increasing in difficulty. Each exercise requires you to perform an operation in Excel, and you get immediate feedback.

You can jump around within the system using the navigation buttons that the designers have provided. So, if you're just interested in practising pivot-tables, you can go straight to that part. These navigation buttons all seem pretty intuitive, and appear just when you need them.

I'm pretty au fait with Excel, but I learnt some really useful things, just after spending a few minutes with Excel Everest:

• You can perform operations (multply, add etc) at the same time as you do a Paste-Special
• Ctrl-1 brings up the Format Cells dialogue box. That will be a real time-saver.
• F5-Special allows you to jump, not just to a specific cell, but a specific type of cell.

The writing style is quite friendly and informal (that's not a criticism - as it works), and sometime it feels like there's a lot of text to read on screen, particularly if you want to read all the instructions. That's partly because the lines are quite long and therefore difficult to scan.

The pricing on the website is for non-commercial use. This includes an individual buying it for their own use inside their company. If you're looking to roll this out to train people across your organisation, Excel Everest ask you to get in touch to talk about their licensing structure. I'm told they already have clients such as Google, PlayCore, and Hymans Robertson.

So, would I recommend Excel Everest? Yes. If you know you're going to be using Excel as one of your main tools, then it really would be worth it.