Beginner Excel Tips to Advance Your Professional Career
What you'll learn
- Learn how to approach beginner Excel issues and use your findings to make decisions.
- How to use beginner math and stat functions with ease to help solve problems.
- Be able to take over someone else’s basic spreadsheet and be able to understand how it works in a matter of minutes.
- How to avoid getting lost in long formulas.
- Understand common error codes and what to do about them.
Requirements
- The will to learn and practice beginner Excel topics!
- Have Windows or Mac computer. Some functions may have compatibility issues on iOS and Android.
- Know how to do basic computing tasks such as copying and pasting text, opening files, etc.
- Have Microsoft Excel installed (Excel 2007, Excel 2010, Excel 2013, Excel 2016, or Excel 365). I use Excel 2016 in this course.
Description
If you've ever broken into a cold sweat when opening Excel, then this beginner Excel course is for you.
Join me as we talk about the basic formula creation process and take a look at popular Math and Stat functions.
We won’t be exhausting every Excel tidbit, but I’m willing to bet you’ll remember the content in this course. The overarching theme is mastery versus overload, and the goal is to get busy people up and running in Excel as quickly as possible.
Gone are the days when you were intimidated to work in Excel. You don't need to know all the crazy things Excel can do to be a top performer at your job.
Even with web apps and the software as a service (SaaS) business model being prevalent, Excel is still used in today’s businesses. Sometimes these expensive web based businesses don’t scale very well to a specific calculation or forecast. Being able to whip up something quickly can be the difference in the perception of job performance.
A great example of this is something that happened at one of my jobs:
One day I was tasked to show the stats of blocked and allowed emails processed by our email filtering system. This system had built-in reporting capabilities, but it didn’t present the data very well.
So I imported the data into Excel, separated it nicely, and added charts and graphs. After I set up the datasheet I added another sheet that predicted the number of emails in each category that would be received within the next 60 days.
Not only was this report a hit with my boss and other management, but I was able to communicate expertise that management didn’t even know I had.
This report opened the opportunity to jump pay grades, all from spending a little extra time in an Excel spreadsheet.
The point is Excel is more than a simple office program that runs your home budget.
Knowing Excel can be beneficial in your professional career. And I’ll teach you the basics of Excel in this course.
I designed this introductory Excel course to be easily understood by absolute beginners. At the end of the course, you will understand how to identify and navigate pieces of Excel, how the formula creation process works, how to use popular math and stat functions, and how to use the diagnostic functions to help solve those pesky errors.
Doing well at your current job is dandy, but what about another line of work?
This course will provide a foundation to students taking classes or starting work where Excel use is required. Jobs that use Excel include but are not limited to:
Financial Analyst
Accountant
Business Analyst
and virtually any IT position
That's right. Excel is still popular today. Other less involved professions may include administrative assistants or simply someone who has inherited someone else’s spreadsheet and needs to be able to jump in quickly.
I'll provide materials to you to help you learn.
The method of teaching is a walkthrough in Excel. I'll provide:
A course workbook (Excel files), both student and instructor versions
Visual instruction on Udemy.
A course companion manual in PDF form.
And many other PDF and XLSX materials to help you learn.
Enroll in Beginner's Guide to Solving Problems in Microsoft Excel today! Thanks for reading, and I can't wait to serve you.
All the best,
Roy
Course Updates
I believe in continuous improvement in all my courses and products! Here's the list of updates to this Beginner Excel course since its release:
Updated all 6 downloadable files (XLSX and PDF files) with fixes, formatting, and more on 3/24/19. The student and instructor workbooks now have more significant differences between them!
Added external links as resources to Deprecated Function List and Discussion, Feedback, Updates, and Additional Reading lectures on 3/9/19. Fixed broken link in the Additional Reading section. Fixed Updates order to have recent updates on top of the ordered list instead of the bottom.
Added an additional lecture on 3/9/2019.
Fixed Promo video captions and Better Basic Calculation 2.0 video captions on 8/5/18.
Updated wording in course descriptions. Also updated lecture references from the reorganization. Completed on 3/8/18.
Added Better Basic Calculation 2.0 lecture on 1/15/18. Woohoo!
Course reorganization was completed on 10/10/17. New reference section! Merged the following articles:
Be a Good Student and Student Workbook
Discussion, Feedback, and Updates and Additional Reading
Instructor Workbook and Additional Course Materials
Fixed Cell Reference Examples lecture (Lecture 4). The Better Basic Calculation portion will get its own lecture shortly. Completed on 10/07/17.
Uploaded Beginner Excel Keyboard Shortcuts in the Conclusion section. Some were used in course, and other relevant shortcuts for beginners were added. Completed on 5/30/17.
Uploaded Beginner Excel Cheat Sheet (course summary) in the Conclusion section. This was an email list exclusive on my website. Uploaded on 5/30/17.
Added Test Your Knowledge end of course quiz in the Conclusion section. Completed on 5/24/17.
Updated lecture descriptions and made them easier to read. Completed on 12/30/16.
Added English U.S. closed captions. You can toggle these. Completed on 12/28/16.
Course released during the week of Christmas (Yay!) in 2016.
Who this course is for:
- Anyone who wants a beginner Excel curriculum that helps you get comfortable working with data in Excel to take their career to the next level.
- Students looking for a hands-on, non-intimidating beginner Excel course with examples, assignments, and other awesome downloadable materials.
- Excel beginners who aren't familiar with common functions and formulas.
- Those who haven't used Excel in a while and need a quick refresher.
- This beginner Excel course is probably NOT for you if you’re at an intermediate level.
- This beginner Excel course is definitely NOT for you if you’re looking for advanced Excel techniques such as scripting, macros, database connections, modeling, etc.
Instructor
- 4.6 Instructor Rating
- 15,980 Reviews
- 38,192 Students
- 3 Courses
After 17 years in IT with the last 7 specifically in Security, I've become obsessed with helping people solve problems and spreading the cyber word. Working in IT is fun for hands-on folks. But for those that stay, you'll find that they love to help others. This goes naturally with teaching, so it's no surprise that some of the most grizzled IT veterans are good instructors.
All good instructors want to see their students apply the knowledge that was taught. I want to take it a step further. My goal is to not only bring applicable knowledge into my courses but to also shift your perspective, even by a little bit. If you’re interested in the topics I teach, I’d love to see you on the inside.
Enroll in one of my classes today. I can’t wait to serve you!
-- Education --
Master of Business Administration, track of study in Information Systems
Bachelor of Science in Information Technology
-- Professional Certifications --
(ISC)² CISSP
CompTIA CySA+
CompTIA Security+
CompTIA Network+
CompTIA A+