Excel for Beginners

Learn the essentials of Excel in only 2 hours

You’ll learn the essentials of Excel in just 2 hours.

Having worked at Microsoft and on Excel, we focus on the core functionality that most people use to make you productive as quickly as possible vs. digging into every single feature available. This way, you’ll have a strong foundation to start getting insights from your data.

Build a strong foundation

We start with the absolute basics. When you first open Excel, it may appear somewhat intimidating with so many different buttons and controls. It may even feel like the cockpit of a jet plane. To demystify Excel, we begin by walking through the interface and covering how you can easily get back to the controls that you use most often.

Next, we delve into how you can enter data efficiently and format it so that it looks good. We then save the workbook in a way that lets us collaborate with others in real time and gives us access to something called version history so you can easily jump back to earlier versions.

Formulas and functions made easy

Once we save our workbook, you’ll learn all about formulas and functions to help you answer those critical business questions. Here too we cover the basics, like how to use the status bar for simple metrics, how to enter a formula by referencing cells, and how to reference cells relatively, absolutely, or with naming.

From there, we move on to some of the most used Excel functions, like SUM, MAX, MIN, COUNT, AVERAGE, VLOOKUP, and XLOOKUP. You’ll understand how functions work and how to make sense of other functions not covered in this course, as there are over 500 functions in Excel.

Visualize your data with charts

We then launch into how to visualize your data using charts and conditional formatting. Charts make it easy to see trends and anomalies in your data that you might otherwise miss by just looking at your data.

Explore your data with sorting, filtering, and pivot tables

Sorting and filtering come next, which lets you manipulate how to view your data. You’ll also discover how pivot tables work and how you can analyze data simply by dragging and dropping fields. With the magic of pivot tables, you don’t even need to enter in formulas or functions to quickly summarize your data.

Focus on just what matters

Throughout this course, you’ll learn quick shortcuts to make you more efficient, like how you can flash fill to separate or merge columns, how to split panes to view far away rows at the same time, and even how to print just what you need.

By the end of this course, you'll gain a strong foundation in Excel & you’ll be well on your way to understanding the story behind your data. Join me, your host, to master the essentials of Excel.