Essential Excel for Business Analysts and Consultants
- 5 hours on-demand video
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Try Udemy for Business- You will master the most crucial functions and features of Excel
- Understand the main challenges in analyzing data in Excel
- Get ready made analyses in Excel
- Analyze complex business problems in Excel
- You will master essential Excel shortcuts that will help you drastically speed up your work in Excel
- You will learn how to structure Analysis in Excel for your work as Management Consultant or Business Analyst
- Basic Excel
- Basic knowledge of economics or finance
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 most fancy or sophisticated one, yet it is universally understood by everybody especially your boss and your customers.
Excel is still pretty advanced tool with countless number of features and functions. I have mastered quite a lot of them during my studies and while working. After some time in consulting I discovered that most of them are not that useful; some of them bring more problems than solutions. On top of that there are features that we are taught at university that are not flexible and pretty time consuming. While working as a business analyst I developed my own set of tricks to deal with Excel I learned how to make my analyses idiot-proven and extremely universal.
I will NOT teach you the entire Excel as it is simply not efficient (and frankly you don’t need it). This course is organized around 80/20 rule and I want to teach you the most useful (from business analyst / consultant perspective) formulas 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 pretty good business analyst that knows how to use Excel in the smart way. It is based on my 12 years of experience as a consultant in top consulting companies and as a Board Member responsible for strategy, improvement and turn-arounds in biggest companies from FMCG, SMG, B2B sector that I worked for. On the basis of what you will find in this course I have trained over 100 business analysts who now are Investment Directors, Senior Analyst, Directors in Consulting Companies, Board Members etc.
I teach step by step on the basis of Excel files that will be attached to the course. To make the best 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 formula 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). At the end, I will show 4 full blown analyses in Excel that use the tricks that I show in the lectures.
To every lecture you will find attached (in additional resources) the Excel shown in the Lecture so as a part of this course you will also get a library of ready-made analyses that can, with certain modification, be applied by you in your work.
Why I decided to create this course?
I have done number of courses showing you how to analyze data in Excel. Yet, I have noticed that some students lack the fluency of operations in Excel. 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 standalone course that will help you to be smart in Excel
In what way will you benefit from this course?
The course is a practical, step by step guide loaded with tones of analyses, tricks, hints that will significantly improve the speed with which you do the analyses 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 Excel in a smart way to be able to analyses data fast and efficiently
How to draw conclusions from analyses – chosen examples of analyses
How to be efficient in your work as analyst?
How to build Excels that it is understandable for you and your team, even after some time
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 in 6 sections and will be adding new section to address other important issues. Currently you will find the following sections:
Introduction. We begin with little intro into the course
How to merge data from different sources. Quite often as an analyst you will have to combine data from different sources. In this section I will show you how to do it using VLOOKUP function and others to make sure that you can easily combine data from different tables into the desired analysis
Cleaning and unifying data. 50% of your time will be lost on setting the data right so it can be used for analyses. In this section you will learn how to clean and unify data fast
How to use IF function and what you can do instead? Most of analyses require you to make them dependable on something. For this you can use IF function which gets messy with more complicated formulas. I will show you how to avoid the mess and in most cases not use IF function
Pivot Tables. As a business analyst you will have to look at data on different levels. I will show you how to do it with Pivot Tables, Pivot Charts and what to do instead.
Other useful functions. In this section I will show you other useful function that you should master
Example of analysis. Here we show full analysis from start to end including drawing conclusions. This will show you want should be the end result
Tools for analyzing data. On top of Excel function you have available other tools in Excel that we will discuss in section. Most of them save you a lot of trouble in analyzing data
Being faster with Excel. If you spend 6-8 hours a day with Excel you have to be fast not to waste your valuable time. Here I will show you how to do it
Visual Basic – main things you should know. Sometimes it is much easier to do something in Visual Basic than go via typical Excel formulas. For some cases Visual Basics creates new opportunities. Here I will show you the most useful elements of Visual Basic.
You will be able also 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
Understand the main challenges in analyzing data in Excel
Perform the analyses in a very effective manner
Who should take this course? Who should not?
Business analysts
Researchers
Controllers
Consultants
Small and medium business owners
Startups founders
What will students need to know or do before starting this course?
Basic Excel
Basic knowledge of economics or finance
- Business analysts
- Consultants
- Researchers
- Controllers
- Small and medium business owners
- Startups founders
Excel is still pretty advanced tool with countless number of features and functions. I have mastered quite a lot of them during my studies and while working. After some time in consulting I discovered that most of them are not that useful; some of them bring more problems than solutions. On top of that there are features that we are taught at university that are not flexible and pretty time consuming. While working as a business analyst I developed my own set of tricks to deal with Excel I learned how to make my analyses idiot-proven and extremely universal
I will NOT teach you the entire Excel as it is simply not efficient (and frankly you don’t need it). This course is organized around 80/20 rule and I want to teach you the most useful (from business analyst / consultant perspective) formulas 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.
Here I give you some tips how you can get the best out of the course
During consulting projects you will have to merge data from different sources to create a nice presentation. In this section we will discusss how to do it in practice, what excel functions you should use. We will use in this section extensively functions like VLOOKUP, HLOOKUP, MATCH and many others.
In this lecture we show you what you can use the VLOOKUP function for. It is one of the most widely used function that simplifies a lot of things
We start with basic VLOOKUP Usage just to show you the flavor and basic construction of VLOOKUP.
We start with basic VLOOKUP Usage just to show you the flavor and basic construction of VLOOKUP.
VLOOKUP can be used to assig categories. This helps you easily by creating rules divide data into segments, cohorts and analyze them, draw conclusions
In this lecture I will show you how to assign categories using VLOOKUP and MATCH. You have the categories described in the matrix and you want to use them
In this case we will analyze what is the fuel usage for different cars, what it depends on and how to optimize it
In many cases the data you have to work with are far from ideal. I will show you what you can do when you want to join or divide data point, how to unify and standardize it
We will now try to check in practice how to find saturation point for a retailer. In this lecture I will introduce the case that we will work with for the next few lectures. You will be asked to find the saturation for grocery store operating in Poland
Pivot Tables help you group data and analyze them fast. You can go from general to specific within seconds thanks to pivot tables. I will show you in this lecture how to use pivot tables, what you can use instead
Most producers / brand owners operate using many sales channels: wholesalers, own shops, e-commerce, marketplace etc. It makes sense to check how profitability looks across channels and what can e done to improve overall situation. I will show you how it cane be done with a simple Excel analysis and a pivot table. I will go also try to demonstrate what kind of conclusions can you draw and what should be your next steps, on the basis of the results you are getting form the analyses
Future is pretty difficult to figure out. You can use scenario analysis or you check ALL the potential options and see which is optimal. I will talk about this technique in this lecture and when to apply it. The impact of the price change on your profit will depend on a few factors. I will discuss in this lecture on what you should take into account and how to calculate it .
Most producers / brand owners operate using many sales channels: wholesalers, own shops, e-commerce, marketplace etc. It makes sense to check how profitability looks across channels and what can e done to improve overall situation. I will show you how it cane be done with a simple Excel analysis and a pivot table. I will go also try to demonstrate what kind of conclusions can you draw and what should be your next steps, on the basis of the results you are getting form the analyses
Here we show how to model the business model of e-commerce
In this lecture I will start the case study that we will be solving for the next few lectures. Imagine that you are a Spanish fashion retailer and you want to figure out which countries you should enter. Therefore, you prepare a ranking of countrires that show attractivness and the size of each and every market.