At Macstock X in Crystal Lake, Illinois, Allison took the stage to teach a 90-minute workshop titled “How the Cool Kids Use Spreadsheets.” Since people have different preferences in spreadsheet tools, she taught the concepts in Microsoft Excel, Apple Numbers, and Google Sheets. She taught how to fill down and right not just functions, but how many items like months, days of the week, quarters, and even hand-crafted lists can fill sequentially. Next, she taught the important distinction between relative and absolute cell references. She showed two of her favorite but tricky concepts: CONCATENATE to combine cells, and VLOOKUP to search for data in an array. The real crowd-pleaser was when she showed how she was able to analyze the entire dataset of the name of every baby born from 1880 to 2026 from the US Social Security system using a pivot table. She actually found the end of Excel because this dataset was so huge.
If you’d like to follow along using her example files, here are a few links to help you. The first is a link to a PDF of the very tight and crisp notes she followed while conducting the workshop. You can download the demo files for Excel and Numbers, and we also have a link to a Google Sheet that you can’t change, but you can copy to play with on your own. And if you really want to go crazy, you can download the baby name file with the pivot table included on its own tab.
File Downloads:
- Allison’s Notes for Workshop
- Excel demo file
- Numbers demo file
- Google Sheet demo file (copyable file)
- 30MB Excel top 1,48,575 baby names with pivot table
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I had such a blast doing this workshop, mostly because there was SO much audience participation. I learned a lot from the audience, and it made it less of a monologue. I was also rather proud of how I formatted three “Spaces” in macOS so people could keep track of which of the three spreadsheet tools I was demonstrating as I flipped back and forth.
Steve actually used 3 cameras and 3 mics to record this. He used a camcorder for video of me, a DJI Osmo Pocket 3 for video of the screen, a remote mic to the DJI for my audio, audience audio using a boom mic pointed backwards from the camcorder, and then an iPhone for a/v of an outtake at the end. It was quite an editing job for him to elegantly mix all of these into one seamless video.
If you make it through the whole workshop, your reward is learning about how I found the end of Excel!
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