How to Use Excel for Beginners in 10 Minutes

About this video

A beginner Excel walkthrough that builds a cookie sales tracker from scratch for the Kevin Cookie Company. Kevin explains worksheets, cells, columns labelled with letters, rows labelled with numbers, and cell addresses such as A1 and D6. He types Date and Sales headers, enters January, then uses the fill handle in the cell’s bottom right-hand corner to drag and auto-fill through December. After entering sales figures (starting with 1200 for January and 1800 for the next month), he formats them with a thousands separator and decreases decimals on the Home tab, and widens a column by dragging or double-clicking to auto-fit. He converts the data to a table with Insert > Table (Ctrl+T), confirms the range and headers, then in Table Design turns on a Total Row that can show sum or average. He adds conditional formatting colour scales to the sales column to spot trends, inserts a recommended line chart, and calculates Q4 sales both by adding cells with a formula and with the SUM function — both giving 31,200 — noting total yearly sales of 67,800. He also shows sorting largest to smallest, filtering to October, November and December (with the total row updating for filtered results), and asking Copilot a question such as total sales instead of writing a formula.

Key takeaways

• A cell address combines its column letter and row number, e.g. A1 or D6, and Excel references cells that way in formulas.
• Use the fill handle to auto-fill a series like January through December instead of typing each entry.
• Convert a data range to a table with Insert > Table or Ctrl+T to unlock formatting, header dropdowns, sorting, filtering and a Total Row.
• Start every formula with an equals sign; SUM with a selected range is faster and less error-prone than adding cells one by one with plus signs.
• Conditional formatting colour scales, recommended charts, and Copilot questions all help reveal trends without manually reading raw numbers.

Episode details: published March 30, 2026 · 8:13 long. Summary written by Self Growth Videos from the episode itself. Business results and any income figures mentioned are Kevin Stratvert’s own claims, shared for education — they are not typical or guaranteed.

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