Essential Tips for Passing the Excel 2019 Exam

hello youtube I hope you're having a fantastic day in today's video I want to give some tips and advice for taking the

Excel 2019 exam the first thing that I want to do is encourage you to take a deep breath yes this exam might be a

little bit difficult and yes you're probably going to see things like functions on the exam in fact I'll tell

you you're going to see things like functions on the exam but if you put the time in the effort into preparing for

this exam like you should then you have nothing to worry about take a deep breath the worst thing that

you could do is get inside your head and cause yourself to doubt while you're taking that exam or just to question

what you're doing that's gonna make that exam much more difficult than it has to be so take a deep breath clear your mind

everything's going to be okay the next thing that I want to encourage you to do is to take a peek at the Excel 2019 exam

page that lists all of the skills that you could be asked to carry out on the exam so the most important thing to me

and to many others was the functions that you could be asked to complete on the exam there's a whole section

outlining what functions you could be asked to carry out and if you take a peek at that and you understand the

functions when you see questions that you're asked to carry out that deal with functions you're not gonna really

second-guess yourself you're gonna say oh that's this function and quickly and easily be able to carry that task out so

visit that page I'll link that in the description below so that you can just quickly click on that and access it and

it'll help you as you prepare for the exam the next thing that I want to talk about is the actual exam format now it's

a little bit different than in times past you're gonna have 50 minutes to complete the exam that's the norm

but in the past with the 2016 exam you had seven projects to complete that's not the case on this exam server list

that you could have anywhere from 5 to 8 projects and within those projects you could have anywhere from 1 to 6 tasks to

complete I literally on a different exam had just one question it complete and it kind of

threw me off so just be mindful of that I think the sweet spot for these exams is to carry out 35 different tasks

between the projects that you're given to complete so keep that in the back of your mind as you're working through the

exam I want to encourage you if you're not immediately sure how to carry out a task that you market for review that's

going to be important you don't want to spend too much time on one question just move on to the next

question once you've completed all the projects if there's still time on the exam you'll have the ability to go back

and look at the task that you marked for review so again mark it for review if you're not sure don't waste your time on

any one project pace yourself from my experience that first project is often the most difficult to carry out whether

it's the visual presentation of the the project or its the actual task questions are just they just seem to be a little

bit more difficult but that's from my experience so be prepared for that that first task they might try and throw you

off guard it might fluster you a little bit but just mark it for review and move on and

then at the end once you've gotten your momentum you can go back and you'll probably figure out a lot of those

questions very quickly and easily I want to encourage you to make sure that you understand the program features we've

talked about formulas and functions for this and I want you to not only know what functions you could be asked but

you should understand like a definition of what that function does so that way you can read a task question if it's not

very clear you can say oh that sounds like this function and just quickly go to it instead of like really racking

your brain and it's not just functions that that should be the case things like conditional formatting or building a

table of the different features within a table those aren't necessarily test questions I'm just you should understand

those features so that when you're reading the task questions you're not really having to think all that hard

about what you're being asked to do I want to caution you this exams seem to be just a little bit harder there

weren't as many give you questions I will warn you that I felt like this exam just seemed to be a little bit more

difficult in the tasks that they were asking you to carry out I didn't think it was hard I just thought the questions

in the tasks seemed to be a little bit more difficult they give me questions that I felt like we're on the sixteen

and thirteen exam I didn't really see a lot of those and so this wasn't a task question or anything but if I asked you

to change the picture size to four inches you could quickly do that by selecting the picture and changing the

size but don't expect a lot of questions like that there just weren't as many as you would have thought all right let's

go ahead and jump into Excel [Music] in the introduction to this video I

mentioned the Microsoft Excel 2019 exam page there's actually two of them Certiport is created one in Microsoft

has created one it's the same information but presented in different ways right here we're on the Certiport

website and the link to this page is in the description down below we have the Excel 2019 exam objectives and we can

just click on download' exam objectives and once it downloads you can just click on it I prefer this version of the

domains over the Microsoft one this document just talks a little bit about the exam it shows you the five domains

that you are going to be tested on and each domain has subdomains and underneath those subdomains different

points that you're expected to carry out for this exam one area that you're going to want to focus on is the perform

operations by using formulas and functions in this section that lists all of the functions that you could be asked

to carry out some new functions that were added for this exam are the count a the count blank the Lin function can

can't replace concatenate and the text join function if we go to the Microsoft page it's a little bit different the

nice thing about this webpage is that tells you how each domain is broken down as far as the test one thing that I

notice is that the percentages of these domains have changed they put warm an emphasis on formulas

and functions that went up for this exam so you're definitely gonna want to know how the domains wait for this exam and

if I click the download' exam skills outline this information contains all the same information as the Certiport

version I'll go ahead and provide a link to this page as well in the description as we begin to look into excel some

things to know are some features that were added to the 2019 exam as well as some of the domains that changed for the

nineteen version the first thing that you should be aware of is that Excel now allows you to insert 3d objects we go to

the insert tab it can be found in the illustrations group and it's very similar to inserting a picture but we're

gonna click the 3d models drop-down and we're gonna select from a file for the exam you want to feel comfortable

navigating through the different document folders it could put a file like this in your documents or pictures

or maybe the 3d objects regardless of where it's at you should feel comfortable navigating through this left

side and opening and closing the different folders to find your file it'll be specific as to where you can

find that on the exam let's go ahead and select our camera image and I'm gonna click insert and we can see that that 3d

object was brought in with it selected I have my 3d model tools format tab at the top some things to note in this section

is we have the different views if I wanted to display the right view all I would have to do is find and click on to

show that perspective of course we have alt text we have some sizing over here on the far right of the ribbon we'll go

ahead and delete this something else to note for this exam is that bringing in a text document or a CSV file while being

able to do that is not new the screens have changed and you want to familiarize yourself with bringing in this data so

that you can carry out a task like that so we'll go to the data tab we're in the getting transform data group and we're

going to click from text CSV we'll go ahead and select our text file for this screen we have our delimiter we can

change at the top down below you have load but you also have load two and those two options will get different

results you also have this edit button we'll click it which brings up this power query editor

there's really a lot of different features that you can do to your data and you want to feel comfortable going

through the ribbon and the different features that you can apply to your data when you're done you have the option of

closed and load or you can click close and load - for this we'll click close and load - and that window will allow me

to put it in a specific spot for this we'll just go ahead and put it in a 11 these different windows will do

different things and so you want to practice this we'll click OK and we can close out of this on this exam you're

going to see formulas and that's an area where the domain has increased so formulas and functions are gonna have

more weight on this exam but some of the formulas that you could be asked to perform or different from

the 16 version such as The Count blank that count a those were both added the Lyne function was added can cat replace

concatenate it's an important thing to know and then the text join function was also added when I encourage you to know

the functions that they could ask you to perform and almost have like a running listen in the back of your head and I

want to encourage you to know what each of those functions do because I'm the exam it's not gonna say carry out the

Len function it's gonna give you some details and you're gonna have to know hey I gotta use this function to carry

out this task with that said I'm gonna put my cursor and see five and I'm gonna use the concatenate

to encourage you to do is to use the insert function button for this exam if I type in can cat this window tells me

that the King cat function concatenates a list or range of text strings if you're not sure on the exam this little

bit of help might help you but it gives you even more help will click OK for this we're just gonna combine the first

time last name so my text one will be a five I'm gonna hit tab and then I'm gonna hit space but watch what happens

when I hit tab on text line to notice that the function builder putting quotation marks around that text that's

a benefit of using this had I been meaning hand key in this formula and I missed those quotation marks I'm gonna

come back with an error message and I'm gonna struggle in this exam in addition to things like quotation marks it's

telling me what text line three is for and for the different functions like if this could be very beneficial to you if

you're struggling for text line three we're just gonna select b5 and click OK and notice it went ahead and put those

two cells together my final point on formulas and functions is you should feel comfortable playing around in the

formula bar whether it's hanging and formulas modifying a formula it's already in there maybe you need to make

a relative reference absolute or even make what's in there of mixed reference all of those are things that you're

gonna want to feel comfortable doing on this exam I want to encourage you as you're going through this exam to read

carefully and to read the questions slowly it's easy to miss a step because you overlooked a part maybe there's two

or three parts to a task question you don't want to be marked wrong because you miss something in addition to

missing something the wording of the task questions can be tricky and you might not immediately know what you need

to do to carry out the task reading carefully will help with that being slow reading through it will help with that

sometimes you're gonna have to break up a task question because you can't carry out part b of the tasks before you do

part C so you need to be able to break up the task know what you need to do first and then make sure you carry out

all the parts of the task if you're asked to carry out an if function don't expect the criteria that you're having

Excel to look for B first and then your true next and then your false third it's just not gonna break out like that again

make sure to read carefully so that you don't miss anything on the exam watch for a quick switch maybe you're on the

perform operations tab and you carry out a task the very next task question looks like it would go with the perform

operations if you're not thinking clearly if you're not reading carefully you might not see that step that says go

to sheet one to do whatever the task question is same thing with things like charts or tables on different exams that

I've taken I've seen that quick switch where it has you do one thing to a chart maybe that's over on the right hand side

and then the very next task question has you perform something on another chart but the charts down below you just have

to scroll down to see it on questions like that the tasks question will give details of the different charts so

you'll be able to identify what you're looking at when you're working on the exam one of the things that they do in

the very beginning of the project is give you a project to overview now this view has changed for the 2019 test

before the project overview had its own tab and you would have to click on task 1 to see the project tasks question

that's not the case for this exam the project overview is actually gonna be listed above task 1 and you might

actually have to scroll through task 1 to see all of what you need so keep that in the back of your mind while you

shouldn't spend a whole lot of time looking at the project overview it is important that you be able to look at

your project screen and identify what's going on it's going to help you carry out the task questions for example on

this worksheet tab I know I have two different sets of data going on but in my top section I have some accounting

information and if the task question said to determine which employees worked a minimum of 30 hours you should be able

to look at the chart and pick up what column you would eat on the exam you're gonna have to be able to look at the

data identify the information that you need from this table and which function you would need to use to perform

whatever task it had you to do it is important for you to be able to identify what you're looking at on the screen it

will help you carry out the task for this exam I don't feel like there were as many gibney questions as there have

been in the when I say give me I mean those easy questions like insert a picture and then

apply this color to it now you're going to see questions like that but I just felt like there weren't as many on this

exam or some of the other exams I've taken I also felt like some of the questions were a little bit more

difficult not that they weren't tasks that you couldn't complete in the 50 minutes but I just felt like they were a

little bit more challenging and they I had to think a little bit more for this exam on this exam you don't want to be

afraid to dig most likely you're going to be asked some obscure questions things you wouldn't normally carry out

in Excel if I'm on the Home tab and I wanted to play around with the text on a one I have the font settings here but

maybe I need to open up the font dialog launcher box and in here I have a lot of font settings maybe I need to add a

border we have some alignment stuff of course we can fill I'm telling you that because the second window gives me extra

features and there are a lot of these dialog launcher boxes that you can find throughout the different ribbons and the

only way to carry out some of these tasks is if you dig in these settings my last little bit of advice for you is

that you should be familiar with the features of things like tables objects charts and SmartArt if I quickly makes

this a table with my cursor in the table I get the table tools design tab and I have so many different features in this

section like removing duplicates you can convert to a range we have some table style options here maybe we wanted to

add a total row we could do that of course we have our table styles over here if we didn't like what we had chose

and the same is going to be for those other things objects charts and SmartArt as you begin to prepare for this exam I

want to again encourage you to visit that exam page I want to encourage you to make sure you know your functions and

what you could be asked to carry out I want to encourage you to put your practice in and then the last thing I

want to encourage you to do is to just take a deep breath and walk into that exam with a calm mind that way you have

every ability to do well on this exam [Music] [Music]

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