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DavidsonX: Excel for Beginners

4.6 stars
73 ratings

No prior knowledge or experience with Excel? No problem!

Mastering a basic skills in Excel will open the door to new opportunities, jobs, and more advanced skills that can help you be more efficient in your work or advance your career in your current or a future position. Come join us and reduce barriers to working with Excel!

Excel for Beginners
4 weeks
3–5 hours per week
Self-paced
Progress at your own speed
Free
Optional upgrade available

There is one session available:

131,582 already enrolled! After a course session ends, it will be archivedOpens in a new tab.
Starts Mar 28
Ends Jul 31

About this course

Skip About this course

If you’re seeking to grow your knowledge of spreadsheets from zero to basic comfort and competence in Excel, then this is a perfect course for you.

The goal of this course is to provide you with a foundation on which you can build more advanced skills in the future. In this online course you will learn foundational Microsoft Excel (also applicable to Google Sheets) knowledge including spreadsheet and workbook anatomy, data entry, summary, and manipulation, plotting and visualization, and powerful tools such as functions, conditional formatting, vlookup, mathematical formulas, graphs, macros, keyboard shortcuts, cell references, filters, sorts, and pivot tables.

Not only will this Excel tutorial provide you with a step-by-step training to obtain strong skills in Excel basics, but you will also find several pathways to continue learning the skills you need after the course. Basic Excel skills are required for many jobs, but more advanced skills are often learned on the job. This course can help you quickly get to the point of being able to learn more advanced skills on your own or on the job.

The approach of this course will be different from a typical software course. Rather than focusing on moving through as many tools and skills as quickly as possible, this course will emphasize gaining comfort and familiarity with some of the most useful and foundational skills, the skills that will be key to your success in using Excel now and in the future. You will have the opportunity to practice these skills and identify general principles of successfully working with spreadsheets to be more efficient, reliable, and effective in your work.

At a glance

  • Institution: DavidsonX
  • Subject: Data Analysis & Statistics
  • Level: Introductory
  • Prerequisites:

    This course is meant to teach the fundamentals of Excel to beginning learners with little to no prior experience.

  • Language: English
  • Video Transcripts: اَلْعَرَبِيَّةُ, Deutsch, English, Español, Français, हिन्दी, Bahasa Indonesia, Português, Kiswahili, తెలుగు, Türkçe, 中文
  • Associated programs:
  • Associated skills:Pivot Tables And Charts, Microsoft Excel, Google Sheets, Basic Math, Keyboard Shortcuts, Data Entry, Anatomy, Conditional Formatting, Excel Macros, Vlookups, Spreadsheets

What you'll learn

Skip What you'll learn
  • Confidence with spreadsheet layout, anatomy, and terminology
  • Good practices for data entry, storage, and manipulation in spreadsheets
  • Common methods of data manipulation and summary such as sorting, filtering, writing simple equations, and using pivot tables
  • Common methods of data visualization using charts

Week 1: Getting to Know Excel & Entering Data

  • Excel Orientation and Spreadsheet Basics
  • Excel Data Types
  • Entering Data
  • Spreadsheet Setup

Week 2: Making Charts

  • Bar Charts, Simple and Clustered
  • Scatterplots
  • Pie and Stacked Column Charts
  • Combining Plot Types

Week 3: Manipulating & Summarizing Data Using Functions

  • Formulas and Functions in Excel
  • Absolute vs. Relative Cell References
  • Sorting & Filtering Data in Excel
  • Conditional functions

Week 4: Bringing it All Together

  • Converting Data Ranges to Tables
  • Unleashing the Power of Pivot Tables: Simple Tables and Charts
  • Unleashing the Power of Pivot Tables: Answering Complex Questions
  • Introducing the Course Project

Frequently Asked Questions

Skip Frequently Asked Questions

I have never worked with Excel. Should I take a prerequisite course prior to starting Excel for Beginners?

You've come to the right place. This course is built for beginners with no prior experience and serves as a refresher for those who have used Excel in the past.

What is the value of the verified track?

Beyond the certificate which you can post on LinkedIn and other social media channels to show off your accomplishment to others, you will also gain valuable supplementary matertials to dive deeper and take the next step beyond the audit track content to learn deeper within Excel.

This course is part of Data Analysis Basics with Excel and R Professional Certificate Program

Learn more 
Expert instruction
2 skill-building courses
Self-paced
Progress at your own speed
2 months
4 - 8 hours per week

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