In 7 minutes the teacher covers about 5 key elements. There is no pause for you to try. I'm aware you can hit pause at any time. This course feels very centered around vocabulary rather than the topic being hands-on. To top it off the teacher talks so fast. Try a different class or Youtube.

very long for basics

I highly recommend people to take the course and learn about Microsoft Excel. I devoted days to complete the course and I am very happy and proud of myself that I have learned more about the software. Throughout the course, I am amazed by what I discovered from Microsoft Excel and how incredible and powerful it is. This happens while I am watching the videos and also using Microsoft Excel on my computer to follow what they did and also when I practised myself and doing tests and assessments. I like the exercises which are rigorous and ensures that learners internalise and apply what they have learned and have a firm grasp of what is taught in the course. The quizzes and assessments can be challenging but making mistakes are how we learn. I think the only slightly annoying thing is that the course is more towards Microsoft Windows users rather than Apple Mac users and I was a Mac user. I was able to figure out the shortcuts anyway. I feel motivated to carry on my learning to the next level such as going on to the intermediate level. Microsoft Excel is an essential, important and critical skill as well live with digital technologies and in a data-driven world. One would feel a sense of accomplishment such as being able to create charts.

Thanks #Coursera and #MacquarieUniversity! The best Excel course EVER... The instructors go slow so you don't miss a thing, the Challenges only reinforce what you learn in the videos, and the small quizzes after each video drove home what you just learned. Repetitiveness is key here- it can be quite easy to forget even the smallest of functions, so keep practicing and practicing! Excel was about the only thing missing from my resume until now. I tried many times over the years to learn- but to no avail. Finally a course so good- I completed my first final exam with a 96.66%! HOLY CROW! This Excel course is by far the most superior I have come across. Bonus: each video is no longer than about five minutes long (no long boring lectures or Power Point Presentations, AND the Toolbox feature is a must!). The Toolbox feature has excellent tips and provides all the Terminology you need to succeed- I personally copied it all down for my own personal records. Also, Ninja Tips. Cool beans.

This course, the instructors, and the way the courses are so well organized, turned this Excel skeptic, into a believer! I'm already excited to start course #2!

This course was GREAT, I am so pleased in the information and the manner in which it was taught. I actually completed it and understood what I learned but was so upset with myself being the one question I missed was because when I selected my formatting for currency I inadvertently selected the one with a comma in it and it was very clearly stated what the format should be. I had the answer correct but that one dumb mistake. What I took away from that mistake however is the importance of ensuring that what you do in Excel carries over and if you are not careful your information can be altered with one slip of the finger. Do I regret my error of course I am a perfectionist, however I took away a lesson with it so it was a valuable mistake. The instructors were very knowledgably and I feel what I needed to obtain from this class was received. I thank you for the opportunity and look forward to taking additional courses on line when I am employed. I would highly refer this process of learning to my friends, family and co-workers.

This is a very well organized, excellently presented, top quality course. I highly recommend it. I already know some Excel and regularly use Power Query to query Oracle and SQL Server databases and generate pivot tables. Yet I learned many new things from auditing just week 1 of the course. I love the pace. There is a short video and then a graded quiz, then more videos and more quizzes. The quizzes sometimes covered material that was not in the videos. I suppose this is intentional to make the students learn to find things out themselves. I downloaded the exercises as Excel workbooks. The exercises are very well thought out. I thought the instructors would have Australian accent and I would have problem understanding them. I was wrong. They spoke perfect American English with no accent. Coursera would not grade the quiz at the end of the week unless I pay to upgrade, but this does not bother me because I can check my own work. I look forward to finishing the course and taking the other courses in the series.

Great Course! The first time I had contact with Excel, it was with Windows 3.11. I studied Excel in a wide book. It was hard to learn in it, ,but I got the basics. The second time I studied Excel was with Excel 98, The books improved a lot. There were very colorful pictures and practical knowledge. The third time I studied Excel was with Excel 2006. There I could see that the interface changed a lot, and I began having trouble with it, ,but I passed the course. This is the fourth time I studied Excel, and I love the way you planned the course. That conversation format between the instructors is very cool! I really feel more comfortable using Excel now. I must share with you, that before this course I remembered that Excel could do many things, ,but I spent a lot of time trying to find the right tool. In many cases, I could not repeat the procedure that I used in previous versions, because Excel has improved a lot. I thank you very much! This was a great course!

I would class myself as quite a competent Excel user, but (as most probably like most!), all self taught with little or no 'formal' qualifications. So I wanted to follow a specialization route to gain these 'approved competencies). Having followed other online training before, I can honestly say that the presentation both in terms of delivery and content is as good as I've ever seen. Really well constructed, with a plan and focus to take you from week 1 to week 6. Great structure that builds upon the previous weeks knowledge and also contains detailed examples with enough data content that allows you to 'play' around and practice. It delivers on it's essentials tagline, as the topics are relevant and focused to provide a great base to 'overcome' any fears of using Excel, so that you can build upon good knowledge in the workplace.

From start to finish one of the best online courses that i've ever seen and participated in.

Il s'agit d'un cours en Anglais tenu par deux profs Australines, un homme et une femme qui vous expliqueront point par point les instruments essentiels pour utiliser Excels dans votre quotidien et au travail. Un cours très bien expliqué à partir des bases de compilation jusqu'à la création des graphiques, surtout en traitant une grande quantité des donnés. Il y a beaucoup d'exercices pour chaque aspet de l'apprentissage de Excel. Vous trouverez aussi des exercises supplémentaires à fin de semaine pour vous entrainer de plus.

Je ne suis pas sure si les entreprise considèrent ce cours valide, mais je l'ai trouvé bien structuré et complet. Je vous le conseille aussi pour ceux qui veulent pratiquer et améliorer la langue Anglaise comme L2.

I thank Macquarie University for creating this course on Coursera. Looking forward for a new one.

This was a very good online course! In many online courses, it seems that several steps are avoided by the designers and teachers of the course, but not here, at least, not for the most part. I was very impressed by the direct communication from the two teachers to the online students for each week's topical presentation. They made an excellent effort to communicate with students, to spend significant time and effort to explain the concepts and methods related to Excel at the essentials level. I appreciated very much both Nicky and Prashan's enthusiastic and warm, genuine interest in our needs and abilities to learn and understand the materials of the course. I truly felt supported in my progress through this six-week essentials course, and I look forward very much to signing up for the second course in the four course-sequence.

One of the best courses on Coursera. The syllabus is so perfectly designed.I thought i knew the basics of Excel but only once when you undergo formal training you know that there's lot in Excel which I never thought about. I came to know about this in the beginner's course only, then just think about the rich high-quality content in the other courses in this specialization. The teachers are fantastic. The instructor for this course is only Nicky Bull Mam but Yvonne Breyer Mam and Prashan Karunarate Sir will also teach in further courses in this specialization. All three are excellent above-par teachers and leave no scope for doubts. Do take the practice challenge and quizzes because much extra-information is given there. Excel is all about practice and exploring. Prashan Sir will make sure to get this into our heads.

Really learned quite a bit about Excel and while learning I enjoyed it. For that credit goest to both the instructors who are excellent and made a bit difficult topic easy to understand. So perfect score for them. Also course is well structured and modules are good mix of text and video lessons and practical exercises. One suggestion I would really want to share that while on such platform 'Forum' works well but for one's queries he/she might have to wait endlessly. So there should be some mechanism to resolve one's query/problem. For that matter if some very good answers by participants/moderators are readily availabe say 2 years back than that response should appear against that query. It should not go unanswered. But overall a good begining into the world of spreadsheets!

This course is, in one word, awesome! Even if you think you know Excel, you never know ;)

The course is elegantly designed. At the start of every week, the instructors sit together and explain what the learners will be coming across in the coming week. The explanations in the lectures are nice and vivid.

All the Excel courses out there have seasoned instructors and all of them have ample knowledge to share. But what actually sets this course apart, from all the other courses, is that the exercises are comprehensive and when you complete those exercises, you are already using the tools, which you may have forgotten if you didn't go through.

Excellent primer for any one wanting to learn Excel. It is equally good for anyone who thinks he needs some polish in his basics.

Very impressive, the sessions are a very good introduction to Excel skills for business! The tutors are excellent at explaining terminologies effectively and it is easy to understand. The detailed explanations throughout this course has definitely enabled me to become more proficient in using excels tools and I have learnt loads more even though I have used Excel before this course. Thank you! It is also very easy to learn and follow the tutors instructions and practice along using the videos, exercise workbooks and also practice questions. Overall, I feel encouraged to learn more and I thank everyone involved for making this course. I encourage anyone looking for an introduction to Excel or to improve core Excel skills to take this course, it is very worthwhile!

I really enjoyed taking this course. The curriculum was direct and to the point. The material covered in my opinion was relevant to how Excel is being used in today's company's. The practice videos, and the quiz that followed each lesson was really helpful. Thanks Coursera and Macquarie University for providing the course to those of us who are looking to increase their knowledge and skill level. I'm very optimistic about securing employment that requires me to utilize Excel daily and fill confident about executing the various tasks to complete effective spreadsheets/reports, charts and graphs, etc. Dare I ask Coursera to find another resource that offers the chance to learn advance to expert level Excel Skills and knowledge. Again, thank you so much!!

Best Excel class ever! I've wasted so much time struggling in those Excel guidebooks I bought, and still couldn't find my passion to learn this fantastic skill. But following Nicky and Prashan's instructions in the course videos, everything became perfectly logical and reasonable. What surprised me even more was that every exercise and quiz didn't just ask you to copy and paste what the teachers had taught. Instead, there were additional difficulties for us to overcome by try and error , but the problems were not frustrated enough to hold us back. As the course progresses, I feel that my Excel skills has been further improved. I would like to express my heartfelt thanks to all the teachers of this course for providing such good learning resources.

I genuinely thought I was beyond this course because I'd used Excel in college, but discovered so many shortcuts and a few little tricks I didn't know. This is a great course to start with as a refresher, but also just to get a feel for how the specialization courses go for this Excel specialization. The flow of the course is logical, well-planned, and builds without spending too much time on the easiest bits and also without excluding them. It's ideal for the beginner or intermediate user...if you can open Excel, you can take this course. If you have been regularly using Excel with a few basic functions but the idea of manipulating data seems intimidating, this course is still extremely helpful. Great course!

Overall, this was a great course and I built up a solid knowledge of Excel. (Prior to this course, I used Excel quite a bit, but I was self-taught on the job, so there were a lot of holes.)

I did have just a little bit of trouble as a Mac user. Most of the time, there were good instructions for Mac, but on occasion, the instructions weren't correct. (In those cases, I had to do my own research to uncover the correct method on Mac.) Also, on rare occasions, there are procedures in Excel that simply don't work on Mac at all, and that was a little frustrating. I spent a lot of time researching online to only find that those procedures simply won't work at all.

Again, happy overall. Thanks for a great course!

I like this course big time - the style of the presenters, that they speak standard English, the tests really help to ensure the candidate has understood Excel but also uses the brain to identify the right answer. The quizzes are geat as they give you hints on common errors that people make and if you repeat it, you get different questions. So it is really about learning the stuff, not memorizing the right answer.

I was using Excel 365 on a Mac in another language than English. This can be hard as the menus, functions, keywords are obviousley different. Also Excel365 on MacOS reacts at time differently than on Windows. Overall great that they referenced the differences between MacOS and Windows versions.

I am more than happy to express my hole journey during this course. Its amazing as well as comprehensible . The course has the ability to meet all the needs of novices and also freshers. Excel skills for business course has provided all desired stuffs which I looking for.The presentations are very nice and easy to understand. This is a very nice and effective way to work on learned elements in excel through practice quizzes. At the end of every module self test for getting grade is very worthy for ascertainment of our actual position after practicing throughout the week.I personally have been very benefited from this course.Needless to say , I highly recommend this course to complete successfully.

This course was very well understandable and helped me brush up on my knowledge of Excel from grade school in the 90s. I've had to use Excel at different times at work and it always took forever for me to figure out charts, filtering, sorting, hiding and unhiding, etc. Now, I feel much more confident and quick. Plus, I learned so many new tools in such a short period of time. The course was so entertaining that it was always hard to say enough for today! Nicky and Prashan did a great job and are a great team! The quizes were difficult enough to make you have to think, but not too difficult if you work through the exercises. Thank you very much! I'm looking forward to the next course already!

FANTASTIC course! This course has given me the skills which will be useful in my career in management. The course is designed in a perfect manner : right from the basics with increasing difficulty. But, the instructor did a brilliant job by teaching in a lucid and friendly manner. The course contents and especially the workbooks were very instrumental in the learning process. Practice assignments were very good. And last but not the least, the final course assignment was a tough nut as it used every skill that is learnt throughout the course duration. I would love to re-visit this course again to brush up my newly learned basic skills in Excel. Thanks Coursera and Macquerie University!

This course on Microsoft Excel is simply an excellent one !! I have been using Excel from the past 10 years or so, but it was just that I wasn't utilizing the full potential of this very powerful tool !! I By successfully completing this course, I feel that I have mastered all the essentials which I can utilize to move ahead in my career... All thanks to the superb and very knowledgeable Instructors Nicky Bull, Prashan Karunaratne from Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia & Coursera for such a wonderful course ! I have made hand-written notes of about 15 pages to remember the invaluable knowledge & skills which I have learnt. Now I can say that '"Practice Makes Permanent !!" :-)

Fantastic Course, Intricately prepared and More practical...!!!

Since I am a beginner to Excel without having any prior experience in Excel, I signed for this course and followed the course, its workbooks and its quiz. Initially I felt it is difficult to pass, but the instructing videos pulled me back to enhance my interest. It really taught me from scratch to finally become a professional. Initially I was bit hesitant to take up Final Assessment Quiz, which had 22 questions, but I took my time and passed the final assessment in my very first attempt.

Thank you very much Prashan and the lady coordinator. You took away all my fears working in Excel. My heartfelt thanks to you both.

An excellent course for beginners.

In general, the videos were excellent and clear.

The shooting of the videos on some worksheets goes at an angle. I think it's better to keep the view straight on, with highlight of the focus area.

I liked the simplicity and easiness in presenting the topics and concepts.

I didn't participate in the discussion forum, but I noticed that there are many threads with request for help, and there are no comments from the instructors! May be they should participate more!

The assignments could have been designed in an interactive way using Macros!

I have done another basic course on Excel before, and Macros were used. It was really good!