Excel for Business Analysts

Course description

This free online spreadsheet course covers some of the most popular and useful functions used in Excel to analyze business and finance. We teach you how to use Excel functions such as ‘vlookup’, ‘hlookup’, ‘xlookup’, ‘index’ and ‘if’ to help you make better business decisions. This course is ideal for those who want to gain practical skills in Microsoft Excel to make business reports more compelling and meaningful.

Excel is popular with companies that use it for various operations such as financial reporting, business analysis, performance management and budgeting. We examine some of the basic formulae used in Excel (including ‘sum’, ‘count’, ‘average’, ‘counta’, ‘min’ and ‘max’) and provide practical examples of their use. The course delves into the difference between relative and absolute reference in cells and explains when and how to use them. We then demonstrate merging and show you how to look up data functions in Excel.

This may appear daunting but we break each step down and you can work at your own pace. When analyzing data, you may need to combine information from multiple worksheets into one with the help of Excel functions like ‘vlookup’, ‘hlookup’, ‘xlookup’, ‘index’ and ‘match’ and we train you to use them quickly and effectively. We then investigate Excel’s ‘if’ function, which performs logical calculations to build powerful worksheets for your business data that let you compare results and values. This section includes some practical examples and implementation of ‘if’ functions in different data sets, which will enhance the value of your business reports and worksheets.

We then describe how to organize and prepare your data for business analysis. Choosing the wrong format and using inconsistent values in your data can harm your analysis so we teach you how to prepare data by ‘cleaning’ and formatting it with the help of Excel functions such as ‘concatenation’ and the ‘flash fill’ and ‘table’ commands. Mastery of these functions lets you prepare better business reports and this course provides practical knowledge of Excel to help you make sense of information to analyze data more deeply and accurately. It will help anyone working in a business environment.