Excel Yourself! Using Microsoft Excel with JAWS for Windows.

Excel is a spreadsheet program from Microsoft and a component of its Office product group. Microsoft Excel enables users to format, organize and calculate data in a spreadsheet.

By organizing data using software like Excel, anyone and other users can make information easier to view as data is added or changed. Within study or employment, many people use Microsoft Excel and indeed data is often tabulated in spreadsheets where in point of fact Microsoft Word tables would be a far better fit.

Learning how to use Excel is one thing, but blind screen-reader users face other difficulties. Due to inadequate formatting and presentation, screen-reader users can become lost within spreadsheets to the extent that it is either difficult to find the data or to associate it with the context, such as determining how cells relate to each other. Many people leave blank cells in spreadsheets purely for visual layout purposes and it is difficult to overcome this major obstacle.

Our new training course, Excel Yourself, will give plenty of strategies to overcome these and many other issues. You will learn the basics of how to work within Microsoft Excel with a particular focus on the screen-reading strategies built into the JAWS screen-reader so as to greatly assist in terms of efficiency, navigation and data composition.

Sample spreadsheets will be included as part of this training course, the topics for which include:

• Customising Excel for optimum accessibility.
• Definitions including worksheets and workbooks.
• Basic navigation.
• Rows, columns and cells.
• Entering and editing data.
• JAWS commands for reading and accessing cells.
• Selecting cells, rows, columns and regions.
• Inserting rows and columns.
• Row and column totals.
• Ensuring Excel workbooks are accessible to JAWS.
• Formulas.
• Autofill.
• Formatting cells.
• Resizing columns and rows.
• Changing the height and width of cells.
• Merging cells.
• Sorting.
• JAWS Custom Summaries.
• Monitoring cells.
• Linking to documents, web pages and Email messages.
• Microsoft CoPilot and Excel.

As is customary with Hartgen Consultancy training courses, you will learn the above concepts within the context of real-world examples which make sense.

Excel yourself will comprise four meetings held using the Zoom conferencing tool beginning on Wednesday 29 May at 7 PM UK time (2 PM US Eastern) and weekly thereafter. If you are unable to make this time, an audio archive and text transcript of each lesson will be made available after the session. As far as we know, we are one of the few companies offering both text and audio. People find the text useful for easily referring back to sections later. Each lesson will be at least one hour and probably a little longer.

The cost of Excel Yourself is £80 which is approximately $100.

Alternatively an invoice can be sent to you which you can pay using any major credit or debit card.

Conclusion.

Due to the nature of the subject matter and the complexities of layout, this training course will be fairly demanding. However, it is hoped when you have completed the course you will have a far greater understanding of how Excel functions and its relationship with the high quality support given within JAWS for Windows. Even if in your employment you only are required to use Excel a small amount, having taken this training course you will be in a far better position to work with it than you were before.