Shoe Factory Spreadsheet Murder Mystery - Learn Excel While Solving a Mystery!

Welcome to Shoe Factory Spreadsheet Murder Mystery - Learn Excel While Solving a Mystery! This is a 5 week class where we solve puzzles to figure out who did it, with new data and suspects every week. In this class we will learn all about Microsoft Excel while solving puzzles, sorting through data, and eliminating suspects. Each module includes slides and an Excel sheet of data to sort through. Clues are provided as we work together in class to solve the puzzles. Each week we are going to work on a new puzzle that involves new formulas in Excel and new features to sort through complicated data. From going through list of suspects, narrowing down who could've done it, and learning many new options in Excel, this course will teach learners how to use Excel, work with formulas to sort data, and have fun solving puzzles. 

The course will focus on fun and interesting examples to help students understand concepts that can be applied elsewhere. Students will have the answers and how to find them by the end of each class.

Module 1: Introduction to the case and the data we will be using. This module covers the functions SUM, AVERAGE, MIN, and MAX. We will use these tools to sort through simulated demographic data of suspects, and solve five clues to narrow down the list of suspects. 

Module 2: Another victim! The mystery deepens as the police have a new (and connected?) case. In this module we will cover the Excel functions COUNT, PRODUCT, QUOTIENT, and TEXT. By filtering and sorting through clues, we will narrow down the suspects on the second data set.

Module 3: Did we make a mistake? We may need to go back to the drawing board with a new list of suspects. Police found a number of new clues that may show us which direction to go in. In this module we will work on logical functions in Excel including IF, COUNTIF, SUMIF and the TEXT function. By working through a new data set with these tools we should be able to narrow down the suspect list. 

Module 4: Is there an accomplice that we don't know about? In this module we will use more advanced functions to sort through our data and solve clues using IF, nested IF, COUNTBLANK, and TEXT.

Module 5: We finally caught everyone involved, but it seems that there was a mastermind working behind the scenes. In this module we are going to work through all of our tools and use SUM, PRODUCT, COUNT, IF, nested IF, and TEXT to find the mastermind!