Day 21 – Introduction to Excel Online (Video Demo)

10/13/2014

30 Days with Office 365 for Educators - Day 21

We are now at the point in this blog series where a few video demonstrations may be more helpful than words. On Friday, we posted a video about how to use the Word Online app to share and co-author a document with another Office 365 user.

Today, we will look at the Excel Online app and share a quick video introduction for using the cloud to create and edit Microsoft Excel files 100 percent online.

Excel Online is a cloud app and therefore you do not need to have a local copy of Microsoft Excel installed on your computer. This is perhaps its greatest benefit. You can login to a computer anywhere in the world with your Office 365 account and have access to all your files that you have stored in OneDrive and do basic editing. 

ALWAYS sign-out of your Office 365 account when finished using it. Your userid and password are all that stands between you and access to all of your online files.

The embedded YouTube video below walks you through an example of using Excel Online to calculate student test scores. Excel Online cannot do everything that its big brother can do but as you will see in this video it does provide a great deal of functionality.

I did not cover co-authoring in the above YouTube video but you can also co-edit Excel Online documents. Co-authoring is a great feature but there also comes a point where too many cooks can spoil the stew so to speak, or in this case, too many co-authors can spoil the document. 

I personally see more value with co-authoring Word Online, PowerPoint Online, and OneNote Online documents but perhaps you will find a great use for Excel Online co-authoring as well. If so, please leave a comment below to help others out.

Keep on Learning,
Tom Grissom, Ph.D.

Twitter: @tomgrissom

http://eiu.edu/itc