The other scouting leader and myself have been trying to improve the scouting system on our team, 234. This year we tried the use of Excel as a way of organizing information, but unfortunately we are losing the person who new a lot about Excel. So, I was wondering. Does anybody have any suggestions on how best to learn the way Excel works. We want to use several different functions of the program including averages, sums, etc. Any tips would be greatly appreciated 
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Jamie
For last year there was somebody, who made a excel database of all the teams and it used a lot of lookup information. If you can find that take a look at it.
The best way i found to learn is to look at how things like that work. I made something based on that and all its formulas.
find a accountant and have them teach you. 
Basically its simple math formals just click on the Sigma button and write a formula for averages or whatever you want
for averages the formal would be =SUM((C2+D2+E2)/3) assuming you’re trying to find the average of C2, D2, and E2
Sigma is the Greek letter that looks like
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./
/
or get open office and use their formula library
Here is a couple of web sites that will help with Excel.
On Tek-tips you can ask questions and people compete for “stars” to help with answers. You have to register first, but it is free. As far as I can tell there is not an excel forum, but you can get some answers there under the Microsoft Office forum.
On Experts Exchange, you can register and then search for questions/answers or you can pay – either a certain amount for “points” or you can pay a flat fee a month for unlimited points. With points, you can ask the questions and ‘the experts’ fight for points. Who ever answers the questions correctly first, gets the points (you decide who gets them) and sometimes you will get answers within a few minutes. (It’s been awhile since I was on this site and I know they have changed their set up, but there is still a free membership option.)
I’ve had good luck with both sites when I had questions on MS Access. I imagine the other forums (Excel for example) would be the same.
I believe that the spreadsheet that you are referring to is 1114’s posted by Karthik… http://www.chiefdelphi.com/media/papers/1975 <edit> I’m pretty sure this is just a database dump with a coversheet… Karthik?</edit>
Some other excel based scouting tools to check out…
http://www.chiefdelphi.com/media/papers/1916
http://www.chiefdelphi.com/media/papers/1831
http://www.chiefdelphi.com/media/papers/1806
http://www.chiefdelphi.com/media/papers/1767
A word of advice… If you are in a position where you have to learn a system from scratch, then you may want to think about what you want to accomplish and then go find the system that accomplishes it the best. (Which may not be excel. :ahh: ) That being said, I doubt that you will ever regret learning excel. If you can’t figure out how to get it to do what you want from looking at the help, let us know and we’ll work through it together.