Microsoft Excel Courses

Microsoft Excel is the industry standard spreadsheet program used for data calculations, analysis, visualization, and much more. It can be programmed to access external databases and is an excellent tool for data modeling, statistics, and financial calculations. With Excel, you can use built-in functions to quickly and easily perform common tasks. Proficiency in Excel is usually required for accounting, business analytics, data analysis, and statistics jobs.‎

We recommend these courses for those who want to take their use of Excel a step further to apply it in business, statistics and financial modeling applications (among others). You may be interested in using Excel for basic data analysis and data-driven decision making, or you may want to engage more deeply and use it for data visualization. You may also wish to implement complex financial models using spreadsheets. Whatever may be your end goal, you will be able to more productively use Excel when you finish one or more specializations in this collection.‎

According to Burning Glass, >2M job postings require Microsoft Excel as a skill. A range of functional job titles require this skill, such as Manager, Accountant, Financial Analyst, or Business Analyst. Whether you're in healthcare, IT, finance, business intelligence, or computer science, Excel skills are extremely marketable in almost every industry. They consistently rank near the top of the list of most important skills to add to your CV.‎

It can help to have basic computer skills before starting to learn Microsoft Excel. It also helps if you have strong reading skills for reviewing the details of how to perform each function and organizational skills for creating spreadsheets that are useful and easy to use. Learning other Microsoft Office programs first may help shorten the learning curve when you’re entering commands in Excel, because some commands can work across programs. Creative skills can help you choose colors and fonts to enter in spreadsheets to make them easily scannable for readers, and analytical skills can help when choosing what data belongs on a separate tab or a different page of the document.‎

Accountants and financial analysts are two of the common career paths for Microsoft Excel users. This is because spreadsheets are typically well suited to organizing and presenting numerical data. Business analysts and project managers are two other career paths in which someone is likely to use Excel. These jobs typically require managing and quickly retrieving large amounts of data including things like raw material costs, labor costs, and quantities produced. Being able to operate Microsoft Excel can also be a requirement for some administrative assistant positions and for entry-level data entry clerk jobs.‎

Topics you can study that are related to Microsoft Excel include the other Microsoft Office Suite programs, such as Word and PowerPoint. You can also learn accounting principles and recordkeeping skills. You can study specific topics to complement your Microsoft Excel skills, such as data visualization and data analysis. Business analytics and business management are also topics you could study that typically use Excel for collecting and analyzing large amounts of data as well as for decision-making purposes.‎

Accounting forms and business analysis firms are two types of places that typically hire people who have Microsoft Excel backgrounds. Retail stores may hire people with Excel skills for management positions because it can help with tasks like calculating payroll and scheduling labor hours. Manufacturing facilities can hire people with Excel skills for management positions. Banks and insurance agencies can also hire Excel users for numbers-based tasks that require a high degree of precision.‎