Ideas for a professional spreadsheet?

[squares]

Hi guys first time poster here, I stumbled onto this site while searching for some assistance with excel. I'll first give some background information on the problem - I have currently started an internship with a financial firm(currently junior in college), and have started working on a project for them.

This project entails me recording the progress of each financial advisor every week as they send proposals to each of their clients. In essence I have to record the name, address, and account number of the clients which have proposals sent to them. This poses a problem because I have to record about 5 clients a week for a few months for 9 advisors. I have to also chart each advisor's progress, and add all kinds of graphics to the sheet. As you can see that is a lot of information, I was wondering if anybody had any ideas on how to condense the information, or any templates that would make the spreadsheet look professional.

I really want to impress my employers because I may potentially work for them in the future. Now as for my own experience with excel, I would say is minimal to mediocre at best, but I am a quick learner and follow directions well. I would appreciate any help that I can get, Thanks in advance for your ideas/suggestions.

[oldchippy]

Here's a link that sets out the basics, the main thing is is to get the data on the sheet first in a table format, headers in top row with relevant data below, without any fancy formatting what-so-ever. You can do all that after once you have your base data.

http://www.officearticles.com/excel/...soft_excel.htm

[squares]

Ok sounds good, thanks for the links oldchippy, it was an interesting read. I'll come back for help on the fancy visuals after I collect a sufficient amount of data. Any other ideas are welcome too.

[oldchippy]

Hi,

If you click on the link below oldchippy you will find a whole host of websites dedicated to Excel, but here's one for starters

http://www.datapigtechnologies.com/ExcelMain.htm