Excel Pivot Tables for Management Consultants & Analysts

A practical guide on how to do data and business analyses using Pivot Tables during consulting projects

What is the aim of this course?

Excel is the most often used first-choice tool of every business analyst and consultant. Maybe it is not the fanciest or most sophisticated one, yet it is universally understood by everybody especially your boss and your customers.

Excel is still a pretty advanced solution with countless features and functions. One of the most useful Excel tools is the Pivot Tables which help you do fast and efficient data analyses. In this course, I will show you how to use the full potential of Pivot Tables during consulting projects. This course is organized around the 80/20 rule and I want to teach you the most useful (from a business analyst/consultant perspective) features of Pivot Tables as fast as possible. I want you also to acquire thanks to the course good habits in Excel that will save you loads of time.

If done properly, this course will transform you in 1 day into a pretty good business analyst who knows how to use Pivot Tables Excel in a smart way. It is based on my 15 years of experience as a consultant in top consulting companies and as a Board Member responsible for strategy, improvement, and turn-arounds in the biggest companies from FMCG, SMG, and B2B sectors that I worked for. On the basis of what you will find in this course, I have trained in person over 100 business analysts who now are Investment Directors, Senior analysts, Directors in Consulting Companies, Board Members, etc. On top of that my courses on Udemy were already taken by more than 300 000 students including people working in EY, McKinsey, Walmart, Booz Allen Hamilton, Adidas, Naspers, Alvarez & Marsal, PwC, Dell, Walgreens, Orange, many others

I teach step by step on the basis of Excel files that will be attached to the course. To make the most out of the course you should follow my steps and repeat what I do with the data after every lecture. Don’t move to the next lecture if you have not done what I show in the lecture that you have gone through.

I assume that you know basic Excel so the basic features (i.e. how to write formulas in Excel) are not explained in this course. I concentrate on intermediate and advanced solutions and purposefully get rid of some things that are advanced yet later become very inflexible and useless (i.e. naming the variables). In the end, I will show full-blown analyses using Pivot Tables that use the tricks that I show in the lectures.

For every lecture, you will find attached (in additional resources) the Excel files shown in the lectures. In this way, as a part of this course, you will also get a library of ready-made analyses that can, with certain modifications, be applied by you in your work.

Why have I decided to create this course?

I have done several courses showing you how to analyze data in Excel. Yet, I have noticed that some students lack fluency in operations in Excel, especially when it comes to Pivot Tables. This course is designed to fill in the gap and help you fully appreciate my other courses for business analysts and consultants. It can be used also as a standalone course that will help you to be smart with Excel Pivot Tables. I recommend it, especially to people who have to work in Excel for 2-3 hours a day or want to become management consultants.

In what way will you benefit from this course?

The course is a practical, step-by-step guide loaded with tons of analyses, tricks, and hints that will significantly improve the speed with which you do the analyses using Pivot Tables as well as the quality of the conclusions coming out of available in your company data. There is little theory – mainly examples, a lot of tips from my own experience as well as other notable examples worth mentioning. Our intention is that thanks to the course you will know:

• How to use Pivot Tables in practice?

• How to calculate things directly in Pivot Tables

• How to draw conclusions from analyses – chosen examples of analyses

• How to improve the look & feel of Pivot Tables and Pivot Charts

• How to use Pivot Charts to present the data & conclusions

You can also ask me any question either through the discussion mode or by messaging me directly.

How the course is organized?

The course is divided currently into the following sections:

• Introduction. We begin with a little intro to the course

• Basic Usage of Pivot Tables. In this section, I will show you the most important features of Pivot Tables that will drastically increase the speed of your data analysis. We will discuss how to build Pivot Table, Pivot Chart, and how to replace Pivot Tables with some other functions. We will also go through an example of an analysis done using the Pivot Table

• Calculation in the Pivot Tables. Quite often you want to do a lot of calculations on the basis of the original data. You can do it in the original table or directly in the Pivot Table. In this section, you will learn how to do it in the Pivot Tables. We will discuss the calculation field, the “show as…” option, and many others.

• Other useful pre-defined options. Pivot tables have many predefined options such as sorting, filtering, changing source data, adding new variables, etc. We will discuss them in this section and will show you some examples of how to use them in practice.

• Improving the look and feel of the table. In this section, I will show you how to improve the look and feel of the Pivot Tables.

• Pivot Charts. In this section, I will go into details when it comes to Pivot Charts. I will also show you how to create a Dashboard using Pivot Charts and slicers.

• Examples of analysis using Pivot Tables. Here I will show examples of real-life data analyses using Pivot Tables.

We will be adding new sections in the coming months

You will also be able to download many additional resources

• Excels with analyses shown in the course

• Links to additional presentations and movies

• Links to books worth reading

At the end of my course, students will be able to…

• You will master the most crucial functions and features of Excel Pivot Tables

• Understand the main challenges in analyzing data with Pivot Tables

• Do calculations directly in the Pivot Table without impacting the original data set

• Perform the analyses in a very effective manner

• Build Dashboards using Pivot Tables and Charts

Who should take this course? Who should not?

• Business analysts

• Consultants

• Students who want to work as Management Consultants

• Researchers

• Students who want to work in Private Equity

• Controllers

• Small and medium business owners

• Startups founders