Learn Excel 2013 Essential Skills with The Smart Method: Courseware tutorial for self-instruction to beginner and intermediate level

Is this the right Excel 2013 book for you?

This Excel 2013 book was written for one purpose: to provide a 100% effective way to teach Excel 2013 skills to new learners with little or no past exposure to Excel. Excel 2013 is a huge application with thousands of features. It could take months, or even years of study to master every one of them. But there's some really good news!

The big secret is that office workers who use Excel 2013 every day for a living only use a small part of Excel's huge feature set. The great news is that, in general, they tend to all use the same set of features. This book makes it easy for absolutely anybody to very rapidly learn Excel 2013 to a standard that will greatly impress most employers - because it will focus your time and energy upon learning the right features.

Mike Smart has personally taught classroom courses, all over the world, for many of the world's largest companies. Mike has run courses for bankers, engineers, accountants, teachers, broadcasters, retailers, insurance brokers, telecom workers, offshore oil workers, power companies... and for many other professions. (Click on the back book cover above to see some of the companies Mike has helped). He has a unique insight into exactly which Excel features you need to know to describe yourself as a competent Excel user. This book will teach you all of those skills.

In this Essential Skills book you'll learn to create beautiful and functional Excel workbooks that will really make you stand out above your co-workers. Click on the front book cover above to see an example of an impressive worksheet that would be beyond the ability of most Excel users. After completing this course you'll be able to create worksheets that are just as professional in a matter of moments. Use Amazon's Look Inside feature to examine the book's table of contents. You'll have all of the Excel skills listed there when you have finished this book.

Absolutely anybody can master Excel using this book

By focusing only on the skills that are commonly used in the workplace it becomes possible to teach these carefully selected, most important features in depth, and in a simple way that absolutely anybody can understand.

And you'll learn all of those skills in less than 400 pages without overwhelming you with hundreds of pages of information about Excel's less used features.

Mike's Excel 2013 Expert Skills book comprehensively teaches the rarer Excel skills that less than 10% of Excel users typically master (and many office workers will not have a need for). See the Excel 2013 Expert Skills book description here on Amazon for more information about this follow-on book.

Not just a book but a professional course

It isn't possible to write a course in the same way you would write a novel. Pages cannot all flow in an endless jumble of information (though they do in many other Excel books). To teach (and to learn) effectively every teacher knows that it is necessary to carefully plan a series of lessons. Each lesson must teach a single carefully defined objective.

This book was designed from the outset as a learning resource and is the same book that Mike uses to teach his classroom courses. It is also the text book of choice for schools, colleges, universities, corporations and government departments to teach their students and employees excellent Excel skills.

The unique layout of this book makes it perfect for both self-instruction and teaching. The book presents each self-contained lesson on two facing pages. Try Amazon's Look Inside feature above to look at a typical lesson. You'll quickly appreciate the immense value of this approach.

Mike Smart is the founder and CEO of The Smart Method.  In Mike's long career as an IT consultant, Mike specified, designed and delivered IT solutions for large corporations all over the world.  In 2002 Mike decided to specialize in IT training and founded The Smart Method.

Mike has personally taught classroom Excel courses to delegates from many of the world's largest companies in England, Europe and America. Mike has run courses for bankers, engineers, accountants, teachers, broadcasters, retailers, insurance brokers, aircraft manufacturers, government departments, on-line gaming companies, telecom workers, oil workers, car manufactures, power companies... and for many other professions. This has given him a unique insight into the diverse ways in which Excel is used by both large and small businesses.

By carefully observing the areas that students find the most difficult to understand, Mike has constantly refined his Smart Method teaching technique over a period of more than ten years.

In 2008 Mike realized that he could only ever teach a few thousand students in his classroom courses but could help millions of students by producing his Excel courses in book form. His first Excel books (covering Excel 2007) rapidly became best sellers and his books have topped best seller lists ever since.

In his spare time, Mike enjoys playing jazz piano, riding his motorbike and sliding down snowy mountains on two wooden sticks.