Excel University: Microsoft Excel Training for CPAs and Accounting Professionals: Volume 1: Featuring Excel 2016 for Windows

During live CPE training sessions, and through Excel articles featured in magazines such as the Journal of Accountancy and California CPA Magazine, Jeff Lenning, founder of Excel University, Inc., has shown thousands of CPAs and accounting professionals across the country how to use Excel more effectively. Drawing on his experience as an auditor, a financial analyst in industry, an accounting manager at a public company, and a consultant, he has demonstrated how to leverage Excel in order to improve efficiency by reducing the time it takes to complete job tasks. Written to reach those he won’t have the opportunity to meet in one of his CPE sessions, Lenning’s series, Excel University: Microsoft Excel Training for CPAs and Accounting Professionals, offers a comprehensive collection of the features, functions, and techniques that are of direct benefit to accountants working in industry, public practice, consulting, or not-for-profit. Concentrating on Excel for Windows, his books offer a hands-on approach to learning and include narrative, screenshots, video content, Excel practice files, and exercises that demonstrate the practical application of the items presented in each chapter. Visit http://www.excel-university.com to access the Excel University video library and to download the practice files. Features, functions and techniques are presented in a sequential and progressive manner, so the books are best read in order. In Volume 1, the author presents material and information that will prove useful to every accountant, regardless of the type of work they do. Blown away by the power of Excel, readers are sure to find this series relevant, enlightening, and extremely easy-to-follow.

Excel is my favorite computer application of all time.

I'm delighted to contribute to the existing base of Microsoft Excel literature through my Excel University series. Excel is a big program, and Microsoft has done a great job of including numerous features and functions that are helpful to many different disciplines. The content of this course really focuses on the features and functions useful to accounting professionals. I've selected the features and functions that I've used during my CPA career and have focused on those items that have saved time.

I've held four positions during my career as a CPA: an auditor in public accounting, a financial analyst in industry, an accounting manager at a public company, and a consultant. In each of these roles, I learned a variety of Excel features, functions, approaches, and techniques that enabled me to get my tasks done more quickly. The most dramatic example occurred when I was an accounting manager; I was able to streamline our monthly close, reducing it from about two weeks to two days. I obtained this efficiency by delegating mechanical tasks to Excel. Blown away by the power of Excel, I decided to tell others about it. So, in 2000 I began to share what I had discovered.

It started with an article that I submitted to the Journal of Accountancy. It highlighted a simple Excel feature: hyperlinks. The article was eventually named "Financial Reports in a Snap" and was published in April 2000. Since then I've tried my best to show others how to save time by approaching their workbooks with proper design, technique, and the correct Excel features and functions. Fortunately, I am able to show accountants how to use Excel more effectively by providing training sessions to corporations and live CPE seminars to individual CPAs through the AICPA and the California CPA Education Foundation. While those sessions are successful, they do present constraints, namely time constraints. Typically a session is 8 hours, and that just isn't enough time to cover everything. So the Excel University series represents a comprehensive catalog of everything that I think is useful to accounting professionals. If you and I sat down together, and you asked me to tell you everything you need to know about Excel, this series of books would be my answer.

The goal of Excel University is to allow you to perform your job tasks in a fraction of the time they currently take. Excel has been my secret weapon for years, and I hope it can be yours as well.