Evelin's Evil Excel Exercises

This is a little walkthrough I cobbled together to demonstrate some of the Excel features I've found useful over the years. It is designed as a practical accompaniment to my "How to Excel at Excel" blog post. In it we shall import some spurious fictional library data from a text file and use it to determine overdue fines. It's not meant to be a serious or definitive example of how to do such a thing; rather it is intended to be an illustrative demonstration of some of the stuff we can achieve with Excel. It begins in quite an elementary way and builds to something a little more complicated, but it's only a superficial scratch on the face of the spreadsheet and there's a lot more to be learnt than is demonstrated in these 60 steps. Still, I hope that what is here may prove of some use. The instructions are written with respect to Excel 2007 and the screencaps are of Excel 2007 being used on Windows Vista at a resolution of 1440x900, so don't be alarmed if what you see isn't exactly identical to what is depicted. If anyone gets lost along the way, there's an exemplar spreadsheet to help you see where things might've gone wrong, but hopefully you won't need it. Good luck and all the best!