Online Resources

These resources are based on the Computing for Historians materials produced for the University of Warwick as an optional skills component in the history department. They provide training in how to use spreadsheet skills to enhance historical research, and will show:

how to use and manipulate access and excel databases
how to use excel to create databases to work on
how to create and select charts and tables to enhance your written work

The resources will help those who possess little or no IT experience to gain an understanding of key database functions useful in their historical research and beyond. For those more familiar with excel, the resources help focus on the applications relevant to study and research. Each section should take approximately 20-30 minutes to complete and is split into 2 movie presentations:

An introduction to the section and the skills it will equip you with, followed by by an interactive teaching and reference guide to take you through skills to be learned
A self-assessment exercise of the skills learned. A full explanation of the exercises and a demonstration of the correct answers/procedures are included in each.

Section 1: an introduction to the basic functionality of Excel spreadsheets	Self-assessment exercise
Section 2: Basic formulae in Excel	Self-assessment exercise
Section 3: Searching and Analysing Data in Excel	Self-assessment exercise
Section 4: Further Excel Functions useful to research	Self-assessment exercise
Section 5: Charts and Chart Wizard	Self-assessment exercise
Section 6: Presentation of data, charts and images	Self-assessment exercise

Before you begin it may be useful to print all the exercise questions and copy the relevant files. These can be accessed via the 'exercises and workbooks' link in the left margin of this page.

The sections can be accessed at any time, and therefore completed all together, or, you may find it more beneficial to break up the course and complete it in sections to fit in with your timetable.

Find out more about teaching and learning resources on a variety of topics by visiting the main History Subject Centre website.

The e Library and Theme Browser facilities have been designed to help your search.

The online resources were created using Excel 2003: see this PDF document (PDF Document) for some useful information on the differences you may find if using Excel version 2010.