Word, Excel and Office 365 Skills

Table of Contents
1 Introduction ........................................................................................................................ 1
2 General Skills ...................................................................................................................... 1
3 Word ................................................................................................................................... 2
3.1 Use of the programme ................................................................................................ 2
3.2 Structure of Documents .............................................................................................. 2
3.3 Content of Documents ................................................................................................ 2
3.4 Including Other Items .................................................................................................. 2
3.5 Other items ................................................................................................................. 2
4 Basic Excel ........................................................................................................................... 3
4.1 Use of the programme ................................................................................................ 3
4.2 Formatting Cells and Boundaries ................................................................................ 3
4.3 Formulas in Cells and Functions .................................................................................. 3
4.4 Organising Data and Creating Graphs ......................................................................... 3
4.5 Page Layout and Printing ............................................................................................ 4
4.6 Other Items ................................................................................................................. 4

1 Introduction
This document aims to identify the key skills required by students in the use of office
productivity tools, particularly Microsoft Word and Excel.

2 General Skills
• File naming conventions
• Autosaving and file version control
• Saving to a local disk, USB stick, and cloud-based storage
• Access to OneDrive
• Access to shared drives at the University of Glasgow
• Downloading and using Office 365 on desktops, laptops and portable devices
• Printing to PDF and University multi-function devices
• Specifying locale (e.g., European vs American date order)
• Use of passwords to encrypt files
• Devising a strategy for data security and to ensure backups exist
3 Word
3.1 Use of the programme
• Default options and modifying them
• Adding words to your personal dictionary
• Spelling and grammar checking – changing languages
• Auto correct and changing its behaviour
• Cut/Copy/Paste and keyboard shortcuts. Options for Paste regarding formatting
• Use of templates
• Track changes and reviewing documents
• Password protection, security, and creating forms
• Mail merge and labels
• Outline mode
• Showing paragraph and tab markers, spaces and other hidden characters

3.2 Structure of Documents

• Headers, footers, page numbers.
• Tables of contents / figures / tables and auto-generation of them
• References (possibly include use of EndNote)
• Tab stops (left, right, centred, with and without leaders)
• Page layout: Margins, gutters, page breaks, section breaks.
• Hyperlinks – how to put them in and how to avoid them
• Styles and autoformatting – how to do it properly (section headings) and editing
styles
• Accessibility: legislation, guidelines and checking accessibility

3.3 Content of Documents

• Sections required for a report
• Footnotes, endnotes and changing the symbols
• Mathematical Formulae (using Equation Editor or equivalent)
• Symbols (Greek, maths operators, m-dashes, n-dashes, non-breaking dashes, non-
breaking spaces)
• Use of tables including formatting tables and defining rows to repeat if a table is split

3.4 Including Other Items

• Pictures, diagrams and smart-art (i.e. flow-charts), formatting of graphics.
Appropriate captioning
• Creating useful diagrams. Grouping of elements
• Embedding into Word (Excel, or other stuff) – embed, link, copy, etc.

3.5 Other items

• Avoiding Comic Sans (actually, avoiding multiple fonts and consistency of font sizing
and style
• Good, bad and ugly examples of style
4 Basic Excel
4.1 Use of the programme
• Recognising excel and Libre office files (xls, csv, ods)
• Tweaking default preferences (e.g. language options)
• Entering data: manually, automatically, importing, cut & paste (i.e. values or
formatting, etc), selecting rectangles for filling
• Preparing excel for export or printing/readability – creating documents that can be
proofread/understood by someone else in soft and hard copy. When to link
documents automatically and when to link manually
• Inserting Rows and Columns and the effect on formulae
• Cut/Copy/Paste and keyboard shortcuts. Options for Paste regarding formatting.
• Fill/copy-down functionality

4.2 Formatting Cells and Boundaries

• Practical row and column formatting
• Understanding data types, correctly formatting data types and custom formatting
• Numbers: display precision and rounding
• Conditional formatting – formatting by value (to show the significance of data)
• Formatting cell boundaries
• Use of Format Painter
• Use of Styles
• Altering cell height and width in various ways

4.3 Formulas in Cells and Functions

• Single Cell formula
• Important basic functions: sum, average, count, counta, countif, trig formula (with
degree/radian), ‘if-else’, simple string formulas
• Complex functions: left, substitute, iferror
• Copying functions from a cell to another one – relative and absolute referencing
(with and without $)
• References to other sheets in a workbook
• Use of Names

4.4 Organising Data and Creating Graphs

• Simple sorting of data
• Importing text and CSV data
• Creating a graph that isn’t something a banker would make but something an
Engineer would make. Doing best fit lines and curve fitting correctly – especially
when the data isn’t supposed to have a straight line fit
• Annotating graphs to show significance of data
• Look-up tables
• Databases and database sorting/filtering
• Pivot Tables and Pivot Charts
 • Filtering data

4.5 Page Layout and Printing

• Use of freeze panes to keep column/rows in place
• Page layout, headers, footers, margins, gridlines etc.
• Print Titles
• Print Area
• Printing multiple sheets
• Scaling printouts
• Inserting manual page breaks and reviewing page break locations

4.6 Other Items

• Examples of good-bad-ugly excel spreadsheets
• Gannt Charts
• Use of add ins
• Protecting sheets to only allow parts to be changed

5 Other Programmes
Many other programmes exist for spreadsheet, word processing and other office
productivity tasks. Students should have an awareness of these and know how to save data
such that it can be transferred between programmes. Such programmes include, but are
not limited to:

• LibreOffice
• WPS Office Free
• Apache OpenOffice
• TeX/LaTeX
• PowerPoint
• Prezi
• Google Slides
• Publisher
• Adobe Acrobat
• Photoshop
• Illustrator