Beginner Excel Tips to Advance Your Professional Career

Introducing a non-intimidating, beginner Microsoft Excel course. Learn to solve problems in this beginner Excel crash course. Now available on Udemy.

Update: the course link has been removed from this post. I will be publishing this course to YouTube.

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 quick as possible.

Gone are the days when you’re intimidated to to work in Excel. You don’t need to know all the crazy things Excel can do to be a top performer at you job.

Even with web apps and the software as a service (SaaS) business model being prevalent as they are, 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 that were 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 in Excel, separated it nicely, and added charts and graphs. After I setup the data sheet I added another sheet that predicted the amount 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 this 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 basic 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 who will be 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 quickly jump in.

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 release:

1. 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 bigger differences between them!
2. 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 Additional Reading section. Fixed Updates order to have recent updates on top of ordered list instead of bottom.
3. Added an additional lecture on 3/9/2019.
4. Fixed Promo video captions and Better Basic Calculation 2.0 video captions on 8/5/18.
5. Updated wording in course descriptions. Also updated lecture references from the reorganization. Completed on 3/8/18.
6. Added Better Basic Calculation 2.0 lecture on 1/15/18. Woohoo!
7. Course reorganization completed on 10/10/17. New reference section! Merged the following articles:
   1. Be a Good Student and Student Workbook
   2. Discussion, Feedback, and Updates and Additional Reading
   3. Instructor Workbook and Additional Course Materials
8. Fixed Cell Reference Examples lecture (Lecture 4). The Better Basic Calculation portion will get its own lecture shortly. Completed on 10/07/17.
9. Uploaded Beginner Excel Keyboard Shortcuts in Conclusion section. Some were used in course and other relevant shortcuts for beginners were added. Completed on 5/30/17.
10. Uploaded Beginner Excel Cheat Sheet (course summary) in Conclusion section. This was an email list exclusive on my website. Uploaded on 5/30/17.
11. Added Test Your Knowledge end of course quiz in Conclusion section. Completed on 5/24/17.
12. Updated lecture descriptions and made them easier to read. Completed on 12/30/16.
13. Added English U.S. closed captions. You can toggle these. Completed on 12/28/16.
14. Course released week of Christmas (Yay!) in 2016.