Course outline

Every lesson, in order

75 short, hands-on lessons that take you from your first formula to the skills employers test. Start anywhere; your first five lessons are free.

Excel basics

1. Intro to Excel
Cells, formulas, cell references and your first function. Start here if you're new to Excel.
3. Working with cells
Use cell addresses and brackets to build calculations that update themselves.

2. Your first formulas
Add, multiply and total numbers. No Excel experience needed.
4. Order of operations
Know which part of a formula Excel works out first, and control it with brackets.
5. Working with percentages
Percent of a total, percentage change, and increasing or decreasing by a percentage.
6. Absolute and mixed references
Lock a cell with $ so formulas copy correctly.
7. More ways to total
Total several ranges at once, a whole block, and a running total.
17. Combining functions
Put one function inside another to answer bigger questions in one cell.

8. Essential shortcuts
Work faster with the keyboard shortcuts people use every day.
9. Moving around fast
Jump to the edges of your data and select it all from the keyboard.
10. Editing shortcuts
Redo, italics, today's date, filters and absolute references from the keyboard.

11. Formatting cells
Make a sheet readable with bold headers, currency and highlights.
12. More formatting
Italics, underline, percentages and highlights to make a report clear.

13. Rounding and maths functions
Round numbers, find remainders and multiply lists.
14. Rounding in depth
Round to the nearest 5, round up or down to a step, and cut off decimals.
15. Powers, roots and products
POWER, SQRT, PRODUCT and QUOTIENT for everyday calculations.
18. Totals with conditions
Use SUMIF, COUNTIF and SUMIFS to total only the rows you want.
47. Totals with SUBTOTAL
One function for sums, averages, counts and maximums that ignores other subtotals.
48. Weighted averages
Give some values more importance than others with SUMPRODUCT.
61. Business maths
Profit, margin, markup and break-even with simple formulas.

16. Counting cells
Count filled cells, empty cells, numbers and non-empty entries.
43. Everyday statistics
Describe a set of numbers with medians, ranks and more.
44. Conditional averages and extremes
AVERAGEIFS, MAXIFS and MINIFS with several conditions.
45. Spread and variation
Measure how spread out numbers are with standard deviation and variance.
46. Percentiles and quartiles
Find the top 10% mark, the quartiles and where a value ranks.

19. Criteria from cells
Let COUNTIF and SUMIF read their conditions from cells, so a report updates when you change one value.
20. Decisions with IF, AND and OR
Make a formula choose its answer based on a test.
21. Nested IF
Put IF inside IF for three or more outcomes, and know when to use IFS instead.
22. Checking cells with IS functions
ISBLANK, ISNUMBER, ISTEXT and ISERROR tell you what a cell holds.
23. Handling errors
Replace errors with something useful using IFERROR and IFNA.
24. Does a cell contain a word?
Test whether text contains a word with SEARCH and ISNUMBER, and act on it with IF.

25. Looking up values
Pull a value out of a table with VLOOKUP and XLOOKUP.
26. INDEX, MATCH and more lookups
Find values anywhere in a table, with the classic and flexible approaches.
27. XLOOKUP in depth
Look left, handle missing values and find positions with XLOOKUP and XMATCH.
28. Two-way lookups
Find the value where a row and a column meet, with INDEX and two MATCHes.
29. Approximate lookups for bands
Find which band a value falls into, such as a grade or a tax rate.
30. Pick from a list with CHOOSE
Turn a number into one of several values with CHOOSE.

31. Working with text
Split, join and change text with formulas.
32. Text and numbers together
Turn numbers into neat text with TEXT, and text back into numbers with VALUE.
33. Splitting text into parts
Split emails, codes and names into their parts.
34. Replacing parts of text
REPLACE by position, SUBSTITUTE a particular occurrence, and count words.
35. Formatting dates and numbers as text
Show day names, month names and tidy amounts with TEXT, FIXED and DOLLAR.
36. Text tricks: REPT, CODE and CHAR
Repeat characters to draw bars, and work with character codes.

37. Working with dates
Calculate durations, deadlines and working days.
38. Building and moving dates
Make dates from parts, move them by months, and find the first and last day of a month.
39. Weekdays and working days
Find the day of the week, add working days, and count them.
40. Totals between dates
Count and total the rows that fall between a start date and an end date.
41. Ages and durations
Work out ages, years of service and gaps in years, months and days.
42. Working with time
Build times, take out hours and minutes, and work out hours worked.

49. Sorting and filtering
Put a list in order and show only the rows you need.
50. More sorting and filtering
Sort by dates and numbers, and filter to several values at once.

51. Your first charts
Choose the right chart for the question and point it at the right cells.
52. Choosing the right chart
Trends over time, parts of a whole, and comparisons, each with the chart that suits it.

53. PivotTable basics
Summarise a long list in seconds by choosing rows and values.
54. PivotTables: counts and extremes
Count rows, and find the largest and smallest values for each group.

55. Cleaning data with formulas
Fix stray spaces, odd capitals and numbers stored as text.
56. Cleaning messy text
Remove hidden characters and extra spaces, fix capitals, and compare text exactly.
57. Finding duplicates
Spot repeated entries and count how many unique ones there are.

58. Power Query basics
Clean messy data with repeatable steps instead of fixing it by hand.
59. Power Query: reshaping data
Drop columns you don't need, standardise text and keep only the rows you want.

60. Advanced formulas
Handle errors, several conditions and multi-way decisions.
62. Finding the top performers
Name the best, the runner-up and the bottom performer, not just their numbers.
63. Building a sales report
Growth, share, targets and ranking in one monthly report.
64. Inventory management
Stock value, reorder flags and days of stock left.
65. HR data analysis
Length of service, anniversaries and salary bands from staff records.
66. Building a grade book
Weighted marks, letter grades and class statistics.
72. Finance analyst basics
Variance to budget, year-to-date totals and a simple forecast.

67. Loan repayments
Work out a monthly repayment and how much of it is interest.
68. Savings and growth
Future value, present value, how long a goal takes, and the rate you need.
69. Interest rates compared
Simple and compound interest, and comparing quoted rates.
70. Is an investment worth it?
Net present value, internal rate of return and payback.
71. Depreciation
Spread an asset's cost over its life with straight-line and declining-balance methods.

73. Interview practice: lookups
The lookup questions employers ask most, on an employee list.
74. Interview practice: summaries
Totals, counts and averages by group, as asked in job tests.
75. Interview practice: logic and text
IF decisions and name handling, as asked in job tests.