On February 25, 2022, MOHAN Foundation organized a Masterclass on “Excelling the use of Excel”- a workshop for its employees which was supported by SBI Foundation. Ms. Jaya Jairam, Project Director, MOHAN Foundation-Mumbai was the invited faculty for the session.

The digital upskilling workshop was aimed at the employees who were new to Microsoft Excel or were using basic excel. The specific objectives of the workshop were to introduce participants to the various advanced applications of MS excel and to make them aware of the various uses and functionalities of excel in data analysis and reporting purposes. With interactive, hands-on examples by the faculty, the participants practiced data entry tools including tables, tabs, ribbons, filters in Microsoft Excel. These skills are also applicable to working in Google Sheets. The workshop was conducted through Zoom App and all the participants joined the session from their laptop/desktop so that they could easily practice and share their excel sheets for further instructions and improvements by the faculty.

At the beginning of the session, Ms. Jaya welcomed all the participants and explained the benefits of using excel in regular office work. She informed the audience that excel is the best way to store data. She then explained the following functions in MS excel:

• Creating rows, columns and tables
• Use of excel tabs & ribbons
• Creating headlines
• Merging rows and columns
• Creating automatic serial numbers, spacing, inserting rows and columns
• Auto sum, calculations, basic excel formulas and data filtration
• Inserting pie charts and bar graphs
• Adding texts to pie charts and bar graphs

The workshop was a highly-interactive learning experience for the employees. The participants were requested to create a spreadsheet after each discussion on excel functions. During the session, the participants asked many questions. To name a few:

• How to use filtration in a spreadsheet? (Ascending & descending order, date & text wise) 
• How to insert pie chart in excel?
• How to add text to a pie chart?
• Can deleted data be restored in excel sheet?

At the end of the session, the participants gained a good working knowledge of excel including basic functions and formulae, sorting and filtering data as well as formatting and printing spreadsheets. The participants were able to create a spreadsheet, entering and formatting data and using tools in Microsoft excel.

Feedback from the participants:

• Thank you for the useful workshop
• Very nice workshop, learnt a lot. Excel has lot to learn/use. It is like never ending program, so much can be done with excel
• I have learned a lot. Thank you

Close to 30 participants attended the session.