Spreadsheets 101 - National Democratic Training Committee

Spreadsheets 101

By Donald Riddle
60–90 min
Data Management

What You’ll Learn

  • Apply formatting options to make your spreadsheets professional and easy to read
  • Sort and filter spreadsheets in order to see only specific data
  • Perform quick and precise calculations in order to answer key campaign questions
  • Create dashboards within your spreadsheets to efficiently summarize and analyze your campaign data

Why This is Important

Most campaigns use spreadsheets to manage some of their data — from keeping track of campaign contacts and donations to documenting and analyzing social media and email data. That’s a lot of data, and whether you have to organize it, summarize it, or analyze it, you’ll want to be efficient and precise. Investing the time to become a spreadsheet wizard will save you countless hours, and it’s guaranteed to be more accurate than something done by hand.

Key Resources

  • Google Sheets Training Workbook
  • Google Sheets Reference Guide
  • Google Sheets Function List

Related Trainings

  • NGP 8 Fundamentals: Navigation and Contact Management — Learn the basics of uploading and managing lists of contacts using NGP 8 (if your campaign will be using the NGP database)
  • VoteBuilder 101 — Learn the basics of targeting voters, building lists, and creating walk and phone banking packets in VoteBuilder
  • Managing Fundraising Data — Not sure whether you’ll use a database or spreadsheets to manage your fundraising data? This course will help you decide, and then get you started

Donald Riddle

Trainer

Donald is an Instructional Designer on NDTC’s curriculum team. Donald began as an intern in summer 2019. After contracting with the organization the following winter, Donald was thrilled to transition to the team full-time in 2020.

Donald graduated from Brown University with a B.A. in Political Science and Sociology. A queer, first-generation college student, the dual degree sort of just made sense, as Donald was committed to marry his studies with his passion for social justice and political advocacy. And through his roles as a Social Justice Peer Educator, president of his fraternity, and a board member of one of Brown's longest running student theatre groups, Donald's extracurricular hobbies also doubled as opportunities for meaningful and systemic change in the way of equality and justice.