Top 5 Excel Courses & Certifications to Master Data Analysis in No Time
MS Excel is spreadsheet software used to manage and analyze data as well as perform financial analysis. It is extensively used in offices, educational institutions, and different commercial places where information is needed to be managed and organized. It is a simple software with a graphical interface compared to other database management tools requiring you to give commands visually by clicking or typing to perform operations. Its graphical user interface makes it easy for people who are not technical enough to understand the complex commands.
Use of MS Excel in Our Daily Life:
So many organizations use MS Excel to analyze and perform calculations with data. It is also used in schools to record student attendance, create results, maintain expense records, and much more. Similarly, businessman and traders use it to manage their inventory, etc. Without MS Excel, the life of the people responsible for managing the records would be insanely difficult.
Just imagine that you have the records of 1000 people on paper, and you need to retrieve a single record. It will take forever for you to find that particular record. Whereas if you were using Excel, you will find the required record by applying a single lookup function within a few seconds. This is how excel makes our lives easier.
Things You Can Do in Excel:
MS Excel is less complex, easy to use, easy to understand, and straightforward than other database management tools. This is why most small businesses prefer to manage their records in MS Excel. Furthermore, it has some pre-defined functions that could efficiently perform the operations on the selected data with just a few clicks.
Besides data management, you can use MS Excel to perform the following tasks:
- Analyze and store data
- Recover Data
- Perform operations upon data using pre-defined functions
- Set passwords on sheets or workbooks to protect from unauthorized access
- Create graphs and charts using different diagrams and graph tools
- Access your data online
- Develop future business strategies by analyzing data
- Manage Expenses
MS Excel is much more than just what is mentioned above. It is updated and improved from time to time to add more functionality and tools.
MS Excel Job Market and Future Potential:
Since MS Excel was introduced in the market, it has been extensively used for data entry, and there are plenty of jobs available for data entry and other positions. Any job title having an analyst at the beginning or end requires expertise in M.S. Excel such as Business Analyst, Data Analyst, Reporting Analyst, etc. MS Excel has so much potential in the online and offline market.
Popularity in Freelance Market:
Freelance marketplaces are full of freelance positions for MS Excel experts. Currently, almost 9000 open jobs on Upwork alone require MS Excel expertise. If you survey the offline job market, you will find much more opportunities, and this potential will expand every day. So, it is crucial nowadays to learn complete Excel, especially for students.
How much do Excel Experts Make?
The average salary of an MS Excel expert in the U.S. is $49,231/year. The average salary per hour is $29. From this data, you can determine the importance of Excel Skills and how much you could be paid if you developed the skills in this technology.
Getting Started with MS Excel:
Now that you know the demand and benefits of having skills in Excel, you must be wondering how to study for excel certification. Although many resources could be used to learn MS Excel, such as online videos, books, articles, blogs, tutorials, and so on, the best yet recommended way is to take online MS Excel courses. The advantage of taking Excel courses is that you get a personal guide or instructor to help you whenever you get stuck.
There are plenty of platforms offering paid or free courses to acquire skills in Excel. However, this article mentions the five best online courses for learning Excel below. If you are a beginner and want to learn MS Excel from scratch, we would recommend you to take a start with Microsoft Excel - Excel from Beginner to Advanced.
And if you are a student of business or a business professional Excel Skills for Business Specialization by Macquarie University will be the best choice you since this course has some specialized lessons on Excel integrated with business & financial analysis. Let's dive deep into each MS Excel course and know more about it:
5 Best
Excel
Courses in 2022:
This Course Includes:
- Duration: 18 hours of video lessons
- Contents: 42 sections • 218 lectures
- Popularity: 989,963 students enrolled
- Ratings: 4.7 out of 5 (301,425 ratings)
- Certification: Available
- Level: All Levels
One of the best Excel courses on Udemy, Microsoft Excel from Beginner to Advance, is the most recommended for beginners. This incredibly popular curriculum is divided into four parts:
- Part 1 covers the introduction to Excel
- Part 2 covers Intermediate topics regarding Excel
- Part 3 covers the Advanced Topics
- Part 4 covers the Expert level topics
By taking this Udemy Excel Beginner to Advanced course, you will develop a strong understanding of MS Excel while learning the most commonly used Excel functions and developing job-ready skills. For taking this Udemy Excel certification, the requirements are:
- Any version of M.S. Excel (2007,2010, 2013, 2019, or Office 365) installed to follow along with the instructor.
Kyle Pew is the instructor of this Excel from Beginner to Advanced course. He is a Microsoft Certified Trainer having 20+ years of experience in teaching and consulting. You should consider taking this Udemy Excel course if you want to acquire the skills in MS Excel and want to be an expert.
Things You'll Learn:
- Course Introduction
- Fundamentals
- Entering and Editing Text and Formulas
- Basic Excel Funtions
- Modifying an Excel Worksheet
- Formatting Data
- Inserting Images and Shapes
- Creating Basic Charts
- Printing an Excel Worksheet
- Working with Excel Templates
- Working with an Excel List
- Excel List Functions
- Excel Data Validation
- Importing and Exporting Data
- Excel PivoTables
- PowerPivot Tools
- Working with Large Sets of Excel Data
- Conditional Functions
- Lookup Functions
- Text Based Functions
- Auditing an Excel Worksheet
- Protecting Excel Worksheets and Workbooks
- Mastering Excel's "What If?" Tools
- Automating Repetitive Tasks in Excel with Macros
- Microsoft Excel Macros and VBA
- Excel VBA Concepts
Featured Review:
“It is an amazing course. In 17 hours, I have learnt so much about excel and all of the awesome features inside of it. Excel truly is an amazing software and Mr. Kyle Pew is an amazing instructor. The VBA sections of the course I felt will be difficult for some beginners if you don't have some programming knowledge. I have some experience with python and C++, so the concepts of coding were relatively easier for me. That being said, thanks again for this amazing course.” – Abubakar M.
Best Features of This Course:
Comprehensive course materials based on four skill levels.
Master one of the most used tools, PivotTables, to create dynamic reports.
6+ hands-on projects to help master the essential aspects of excel.
Top-rated among the communities
Self-paced Learning Style
Affordable Pricing: $11.99
This Course Includes:
- Duration: 6 months long course
- Contents: 4 courses in total
- Popularity: 391,694 students enrolled
- Ratings: 4.9 out of 5 (37,828 ratings)
- Certification: Available
- Level: Beginner
Coursera is another great platform to learn anything. It offers thousands of courses on different subjects, including MS Excel. You can find many online Excel courses with certificates for different levels of expertise on Coursera. However, the course mentioned above is the best and most complete Excel course for people willing to manage their business-related data on MS Excel.
This Excel course for beginners will help you to learn Excel basics by introducing the Excel interface. When you get comfortable with the interface and understand how to use it, it will take you to the formulas and functions to perform operations on data. After that, you will get into the charts and graphs to visualize the data, and later you’ll also learn to create user-friendly spreadsheets while identifying and correcting errors.
This Specialization includes four courses i.e.
- Excel Skills for Business: Essentials
- Excel Skills for Business: Intermediate I
- Excel Skills for Business: Intermediate II
- Excel Skills for Business: Advanced
Undoubtedly, it is the best course for advanced Excel learning. This outstanding MS Excel course is the Co-Creation of Nicky Bull (Lecturer and Lead Content Designer), Professor Yvonne Breyer, and Dr. Prashan S.M. Karunaratne.
Things You'll Learn:
- Data Validation
- Microsoft Excel
- Microsoft Excel Macro
- Pivot Table
- Graphs
- Spreadsheet
- Chart
- Concatenation
- Consolization
- Pivot Chart
- Lookup Table
- Microsoft Excel VBA
Featured Review:
“I have completed the "Excel Skill for Business" specialization by Macquarie University after 90+ hours of resilient learning and growth. After completing this Specialization, I can confidently say that I have gained deep insights into one of the most powerful spreadsheets and analytics tools i.e., Microsoft excel. The Specialization entails of four courses which covers all the concepts of Excel (Basics to Advanced). I would like to thank Nicky Bull, Prashan Karunaratne and Coursera for providing me such a wholesome experience.” – Atisheya M
Best Features of This Course:
A well-organized course for both students and business professionals.
Building a professional dashboard to demonstrate the practical use of data.
The highest-rated excel course among all the platforms
Self-paced Learning Style.
Affordable Pricing: $39.99/Mo
This Course Includes:
- Duration: 20 hours long course
- Contents: 4 modules • 30 lectures
- Popularity: 211,034 students enrolled
- Ratings: 4.7 out of 5 (9,067 ratings)
- Certification: Available
- Level: Beginner
Being an introductory and one of the best Excel courses for data analysis on Coursera, it covers Excel’s basic working knowledge. According to the instructor of this course, MS Excel is nowadays used by every business in day-to-day activities. The skills a learner will acquire by taking this Microsoft Excel course include entering data into excel sheets, managing and organizing it, performing operations on data, applying Excel functions and formulas, and much more. Furthermore, you’ll learn about charts and graphs for data visualization.
This Excel certification course could be suited for anybody looking to develop skills in Microsoft Excel as well as master Data Analysis skills. You’ll need Microsoft Excel 2010 or a later version for taking this beginner to advanced Excel course.
Sharade Borle, an Associate Professor of Management, is the instructor of this course. He has designed eight courses on Coursera alone. Secondly, this excel certification course is presented by Rice University, one of the top 20 universities in the U.S.
Things You'll Learn:
- Basic functions
- arithmetic and logical functions
- Formatting rows and columns
- Using formulas
- absolute and relative referencing
- IF and the nested IF functions
- VLOOKUP and HLOOKUP
- The RANDBETWEEN function
- VLOOKUP across worksheets
- Data filtering
- Pivot tables
- Advanced Graphing and Charting
- Line, Bar and Pie charts
- Pivot charts
- Scatter plots
- Histograms
Featured Review:
“I would give 5 out of 5 without any hesitation. It is a wonderful course covering right from the basics to a moderate level, presenting the approaches to analyze the data. Good that Dr. Borle had presented tricky assignments for the course, that really helped us to use our brains and dig into the analysis. Much appreciated course. Thank you, Dr. Borle and Coursera. Look forward to many more interesting courses on Data Analysis and Analytics.” – M.Vikas
Best Features of This Course:
Providing you a working knowledge of Excel to more advanced topics in Business Statistics.
Practically explores various advanced graphing and charting techniques available in Excel
Self-paced Learning Style
Affordable Pricing: $39.99/Mo
This Course Includes:
- Duration: 9 hours of video lessons
- Contents: 17 sections • 84 lectures
- Popularity: 795,001 students learned
- Ratings: 4.7 out of 5 (3,401 Ratings)
- Certification: LinkedIn and National Association of State Boards of Accountancy (NASBA)
- Level: Beginner + Intermediate
LinkedIn Learning is another great platform to acquire MS Excel skills. Many instructors offer Excel classes on this platform, but Excel 2016 Essential Training is the best one. These Excel training classes cover beginners to expert topics, including data organization and management, data manipulation, visualization, and analysis.
You can take these Excel lessons online:
- If you are a beginner and want to learn Excel from scratch
- If you have intermediate knowledge and want to enhance your skills
- If you wish to apply for a data entry or any other job requiring Excel expertise
Dennis Taylor, an experienced author, designed this comprehensive Excel course, who has also remained a trainer having experience of more than 25 years in MS Excel.
Things You'll Learn:
- Mastering Excel
- Inserting data
- Organize data
- Calculations with simple functions
- Working with multiple worksheets
- Formatting the data and cells
- Build charts and PivotTables
- IF function
- VLOOKUP function
- COUNTIF function
- Solver, and other data analysis tools
- Automating tasks with macros
Featured Review:
“It was a learning experience and I would definitely recommend it to someone who has just started using excel. I would like to call it an overview of excel and getting acquainted with excel basics & terminologies. The instructor was very clear in terms of explaining and he gave practical examples and even though I already knew a lot of the things but I learnt something new as well.” – Abhishek Chaturvedi
Best Features of This Course:
Covers the powerful IF, VLOOKUP, COUNTIF functions, Solver, and other data analysis tools.
Practical lessons on automating tasks with macros
Self-paced Learning Style.
Affordable Pricing: $29.99/Mo
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This Course Includes:
- Duration: 26 hours long course
- Contents: 10 modules • 57 lessons
- Popularity: 51,000+ students learned
- Ratings: 4.6 out of 5 (2,191 ratings)
- Certification: Available (Accredited by CPD)
- Level: Beginner
This is another MS Excel basic course covering the fundamentals of advanced topics. You develop hands-on experience while taking this course as you create so many spreadsheets throughout the period. This incredible basic and advanced Excel course teaches you how to be productive in MS Excel.
More than 51000 people have acquired vital skills in MS Excel with the help of these Excel training classes. It does not require you to have any prior knowledge regarding Excel or any other spreadsheet software. After completing this program, you get a CPD accredited certificate that quickly helps you get the job. The designer of this course is Ken Puls, a Microsoft MVP.
Things You'll Learn:
- Getting to Know Excel
- Essential Formula Knowledge
- math, statistical, logic and text functions
- Intermediate Formula Knowledge
- VLOOKUP, HLOOKUP, INDEX, MATCH
- Optimizing Data
- filtering data
- Data Analysis
- Creating PivotTables
- Formatting PivotTables
- What-If Analysis
- Getting and Transforming Data
- Presenting and Reporting
- Building charts
- Validating and Updating
- Advanced Formulas
- basic Macro to automate repetitive tasks
Featured Review:
"I love the new website format. The smaller modules are fantastic. The option to extend access to the course is really great as well, so that I can go back and review certain aspects of the course. I found it very helpful to have the exercise excel worksheet open while listening to the video so I can try what was being taught right away on the exercise worksheet. All in all, I am glad I chose this method of learning this material, I can do it on my own time, anytime and anywhere. Thanks." – Ute Jacobs
Best Features of This Course:
Short & entertaining videos with quality content to make the whole course enjoyable
Equipped with real-world Excel knowledge to accomplish your daily tasks
Self-paced Learning Style.
Affordable Pricing: $29
Thank you for reading this article. We hope you liked it and found the best Excel course according to your expertise in Excel. Please share this article with others so that they can know about the best online courses to learn MS Excel. However, if you already have office skills and you want to sell your services, you will have to let people know about your skills. This is only possible if you do marketing. So, check out our 5 Popular Courses & Certifications to Master Digital Marketing to learn how to effectively market your products/services. Best of Luck and Thank you!
Let's COMPARE ALL Five COURSES⚖️
Courses
1. Microsoft Excel - Excel from Beginner to Advanced – Udemy
2. Excel Skills for Business Specialization by Macquarie University – Coursera
3. Introduction to Data Analysis Using Excel by Rice University – Coursera
4. Excel 2016 Essential Training – LinkedIn Learning
5. Microsoft Excel - Basic & Advanced – Goskills
platforms
Course Ratings
4.7
4.9
4.7
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