Excel Crash Course: Dashboards, Data Analysis & Heatmaps

This is a 100% project-based Microsoft Excel crash course with a special focus on data analysis, designing simple dashboards and creating heatmap visuals and other charts. Maximizing office productivity is a key skill to learn. By working with modern Excel tables and learning how to extract insights from data, you'll achieve a leap in your Excel skills in 3 hours.

Supercharge your Microsoft Excel skills rapidly in this Crash Course!

As a Business Intelligence consultant, I designed the curriculum based on some of the skills needed to get you powering through your daily business needs, and I’ve designed the courses to achieve specific objectives. This course is a hack to develop advanced power-user skills in Microsoft Excel on Office 365 in a very short period of time.

Students will work on two different datasets - Twitter data and fuel prices data - to design dashboards and extract insights using Pivot tables and beautiful heat maps.

In this course you will learn how to:

1. Explore Microsoft Excel from a data science, data visualisation and data analysis perspective

2. Design three dashboard systems in Excel - Twitter Activity Heatmap, Advanced Currency Converter, Business Invoicing Dashboard

3. Work with Excel time intelligence and text functions to extract HOUR of DAY, DAY of WEEK etc

4. Manipulate pivot tables to design effective and beautiful charts and heatmap visuals

5. Design and customise pivot charts by adding custom images

6. Use the Power Query tool to manipulate and mashup data

7. Use certain tips and tricks to fine-tune your Excel dashboards and visuals to supercharge your data visualisation skills

8. Test your data analysis skills by working on data retrieved from Twitter API

9. Learn HOW to maximize office productivity and increase your salary with automation skills

   
   

Why Excel skills matter

Advanced Microsoft Excel skills can open up a whole myriad of career opportunities in business analysis, product management, data analysis, operations and strategy roles. As a skilled Excel user that is able to extract insights from data, you will be comfortable in working in industries such as finance, consulting, manufacturing, pharmaceutical, analytics or other business roles. Excel is the primary spreadsheet application used in financial modelling and ad-hoc data analysis.

In this 100% example-based and project-based course, you’ll develop highly marketable business-focused Excel skills in data analysis and data visualisation to help you outperform competing candidates for promotions, job opportunities, and internships. You’ll learn what it means to be the Excel go-to person having an unfair advantage in analytical skills.

How is the course structured?

The course curriculum has been designed as a project-based, crash course. You will learn rapidly by working through the Twitter dataset to understand rudimentary data analysis and design novel heatmaps. Then in the latter half of the course, you will learn how to work with modern Excel tables and manipulate them using the Power Query tool, structured referencing, and using the functions available on Office 365 version of Excel to craft automated calculations and dashboards.

The course builds on itself, meaning that as we continue forward in the course we’ll re-use the concepts from previous sections to further reinforce them. All of the material is 100% example-based and we’ll use multiple real-life examples throughout the course.

The course is composed of 18 short lectures each of which covers one concept at a time, and 2 problem-solving sessions (data challenges). The full course length is 1.8 hours of well thought out, deliberate content to get you building and designing within Excel. You will also get over 1 hour of practice problems which are very detailed and cover real-life analytical scenarios.

I designed this course to be as practical and as relatable as possible by using sample data from real-life activities. The course is complete with working files, you’ll be able to follow along practising each concept and receive a verifiable certificate of completion when you finish the course!

It's a crash course so be ready to take a leap!

Are there any course requirements or prerequisites?

• Preferably Excel on Office 365 for Windows. Microsoft Excel 2010-2019 (PC/Windows)

• Mac users are welcome but note that the interface of Pivot Tables varies across platforms

• Knowledge of Excel for basic reporting is an added advantage but not required

• Be ready to make a leap. It's a crash course

Who this course is for:

• Beginner in Excel interested in data analysis

• More advanced users looking to learn how to improve office productivity

• Business students curious about data visualization

• Business professionals interested in data analysis and modelling

• Crash course enthusiasts

• Python developers and coders interested in data analysis and Excel