Excel for Beginners (edX)

No knowledge of Excel? No problem! Mastering a few basic skills in Excel will open the door to new opportunities, jobs, and more advanced skills that can help you be more efficient in your work or advance your career in your current or a future position. If you’re hoping to move from knowing almost nothing about spreadsheets to basic comfort and competence in Excel, then this is a perfect course for you. The goal of this course is to give you a foundation on which you can build more advanced skills in the future.

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In this course you will learn foundational Excel knowledge like spreadsheet and workbook anatomy, data entry, summary, and manipulation, plotting and visualization, and powerful tools such as filters, sorts, and pivot tables. Not only will you gain strong skills in Excel basics, you will also find several pathways to continue learning the skills you need after the course. Basic Excel skills are required for many jobs, but more advanced skills are often learned on the job. This course can help you quickly get to the point of being able to learn more advanced skills on your own or on the job.

The approach of this course will be different from a typical software course. Rather than focusing on moving through as many tools and skills as quickly as possible, this course will emphasize gaining comfort and familiarity with some of the most useful and foundational skills, the skills that will be key to your success in using Excel now and in the future. You will have the opportunity to practice these skills and identify general principles of successfully working with spreadsheets to be more efficient, reliable, and effective in your work.

This course is part of the Data Analysis Basics with Excel and R Professional Certificate.

What you'll learn

- Confidence with spreadsheet layout, anatomy, and terminology

- Good practices for data entry, storage, and manipulation in spreadsheets

- Common methods of data manipulation and summary such as sorting, filtering, writing simple equations, and using pivot tables

- Common methods of data visualization using charts

Syllabus

Week 1: Getting to Know Excel & Entering Data

Excel Orientation and Spreadsheet Basics

Excel Data Types

Entering Data

Spreadsheet Setup

Week 2: Making Charts

Bar Charts, Simple and Clustered

Scatterplots

Pie and Stacked Column Charts

Combining Plot Types

Week 3: Manipulating & Summarizing Data Using Functions

Formulas and Functions in Excel

Absolute vs. Relative Cell References

Sorting & Filtering Data in Excel

Conditional functions

Week 4: Bringing it All Together

Converting Data Ranges to Tables

Unleashing the Power of Pivot Tables: Simple Tables and Charts

Unleashing the Power of Pivot Tables: Answering Complex Questions

Introducing the Course Project

Data Analysis Basics with Excel and R Professional Certificate

MOOC List is learner-supported. When you buy through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.

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