Excel Tutorial for Social Workers and Human Services Professionals
Excel for Social Work Program Evaluation: Data Management & Analysis Tutorials
This video series provides an introduction to using Microsoft Excel for data management and analysis in social work, human services, and related fields program evaluation. These tutorials are designed for students and practitioners in social work, nonprofit, and human services settings who want to build practical skills for working with data to tell the story of their program’s impact.
You’ll learn:
How to set up and organize your data
How to clean data and use basic formulas
How to create pivot tables, bar charts, and pie charts
How to calculate descriptive statistics (frequencies, percents, means, medians)
How to run inferential tests (Chi-Square, T-Test, and ANOVA)
How to interpret results for real-world program evaluation
Perfect for social work students, nonprofit staff, or anyone looking to use Excel to better understand data in human service settings.
Datasets
Two fictional datasets are available for your use to learn how to use the tools and follow along with the videos. The first “Human Services” dataset is used in the videos, the second “After-School” dataset is for you to use for practice. Enjoy!
Video 1: How to Set Up and Organize Data in Excel
In this video, you’ll learn the basics of setting up a clean, well-organized dataset in Excel for program evaluation. I’ll show you best practices for entering data, naming variables, and structuring your spreadsheet to prepare for analysis.
Video 2: How to Clean Data and Use Formulas in Excel
This video covers simple but essential Excel skills for cleaning your data and using basic formulas like COUNT, COUNTA, SUM, and AVERAGE. You’ll also learn tips for spotting errors, inconsistencies, and missing data.
Video 3: How to Use Pivot Tables and Create Charts in Excel
Pivot tables are a powerful tool in Excel for summarizing data quickly. In this video, you’ll learn how to create pivot tables, use filters, and generate charts to visualize your data in ways that are accessible to stakeholders.
Video 4: How to Explore Frequencies, Percents, and Measures of Central Tendency in Excel
In this video, you’ll learn how to calculate frequencies and percentages for categorical variables like gender or race/ethnicity, and how to calculate the mean, median, and mode for continuous variables like age or outcome scores.
Video 5: How to Run a Chi-Square Test in Excel
Chi-square is a test used to explore relationships between two categorical variables. In this video, you’ll learn how to use Excel’s CHISQ.TEST function to determine whether differences between groups are statistically significant.
Video 6: How to Run a T-Test and ANOVA in Excel
In this final video, I’ll walk you through how to use Excel to run a paired-samples t-test (comparing pre- and post-test scores) and a single-factor ANOVA (comparing means across three or more groups). I’ll also talk about how to interpret p-values and what these tests tell us in the context of social work evaluation.