A Note about Levels:

Excel for Poets wants to make sure your knowledge-building quest is taking place in a reasonable order. Because I don't create posts in any rational order, I've tried to aid this process by tagging posts based on four "experience" or "degree of difficulty" levels. Here is my attempt to rationalize their meanings:

1. Beginner: You read the Welcome post and said, "yes, that's me, this is going to be awesome" (or, "yes, that's me, this blog is lame, but may actually come in handy"). You've probably encountered Excel, but you also probably struggled through making a chart for school and may not know how to add two cells together. The Beginner posts focus mainly on foundational concepts, such as filling and references that will be assumed knowledge in later posts. In addition to this, rudimentary functions will be addressed, but nothing fundamentally more complicated than the SUM function.

2. Intermediate: You either graduated the Beginner course or came in knowing the basics. You probably have some knowledge of Excel, but it probably isn't well-organized. By this I mean that you encountered a specific problem and either learned or figured out a specific solution without necessarily understanding the underlying logic of it. For people who consider themselves "intermediates" I would recommend taking a quick look at the beginner posts, just in case anything slipped through the cracks. In terms of content, the Intermediate lessons will probably be the most useful as a reference source. I will go through a large number of functions and demonstrate how to use them, and hopefully in realistic situations where they will be useful. The limit is that each function will be used in a plain vanilla, straightforward way.

3. Excel Jock (or just "Jock"): You know the functions, and came not to learn the basics, but to up your already formidable game. Maybe you came just to point out that there may be a better way to do something than the way I did it. In that case, I challenge you to a duel (and invite you to make a mocking, scathing comment). The Jock posts will broadly cover optimized spreadsheet design and accomplishing the goal of truly separating your 'hard-coded' or downloaded data from the badass calculation/presentation engine you've created. The name of the game will be flexibility in both data aggregation and location through aggressive use of conditionals, power lookups, conditional sums, and maybe dynamic ranges (haven't decided if this is Jock level or . . .

4. All-Madden: BOOM! You're Jocky enough to get voted to the All-Star team. The All-Madden posts will predominately explore the use of Array formulas to establish complete and utter supremacy over your data. In addition to arrays, there will be some arbitrary level at which a Jock formula might become a little too monstrous and move into the All-Madden category. Things such as embedded dynamic ranges and multiple OFFSETS might qualify. I also want to make it clear that I will not be covering any VBA or macro stuff, and all the functions will work in either Excel 2007 or 2003. There will also be scant coverage of graphs/charts and pivot tables (even though they're totally awesome). We'll see how it goes.