Microsoft Excel is one of the most popular software that is used across different industries and professions. If you work for an organization, it will be expected that you have had a few Excel-specific classes and can find your way with the tool.
Even if you are the boss, you will still need to use Excel to maintain the supply chain of your business and carry out certain projections and analyses.
Fortunately, there are hundreds of Excel tutorials on the internet that can take you from novice to expert level in no time. Some of these tutorials are free, while others are not usually that expensive.
There are also places where you can learn Excel offline, but combining several of these online tutorials often makes you more proficient in Excel than any classroom lecture can.
Learning Excel online means that you will not have to spend as much on tuition, transportation, and the timing is flexible.
Since virtually every sector of society makes use of Excel on a consistent basis, you may find it rewarding to learn about it and put it on your CV.
Nowadays, companies are looking for Excel experts with the ability to work with powerful formulas and charts, so learning Excel could improve your job opportunities, especially if you lack academic experience.
In this article, we will set you up with the top 17 Excel courses to get you started.
Best Excel Training, Online Classes & Courses
1. Microsoft Excel Course For Beginner to Advanced Learners (Udemy)
The first course on this list is one that was designed by Kyle Pew who has been a professional computer teacher for the last 20 years.
Kyle has committed to teaching several types of computer courses such as HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and Visual Basic.
His Excel course runs for more than 20 hours and is made up of videos, articles, and other types of resources.
It is designed for computer users who have no previous knowledge of Microsoft Excel but want to grow from beginner to expert in a matter of days.
The course is broken down into four levels. Each level teaches a new set of skills before you can progress to the next one.
The lectures are available to take on mobile devices like Android and iPhone. There are six projects that you will need to execute as you learn new things about VBA and macros.
If you are entirely new to Excel as an application, you may easily be confused at the introduction of new modules, but the progression of topics in this tutorial is very well structured, so you will keep up well.
Topics like macros and VBA that are more advanced for Excel beginners are carefully approached until you gradually get the hang of them.
2. Excel Essentials: The Complete Excel Series Level 1, 2, and 3 (Udemy)
This Udemy course is split into three levels.
The first level is for complete Excel beginners, including those who have previously never seen a spreadsheet before.
Level one will teach you how to create your own Excel spreadsheet from scratch and will show you faster methods of executing tasks that may be challenging to even professionals.
The next level introduces you to Excel relational databases. Here you will learn to use new tools like Gantt charts to plan for projects to stay ahead of your competitors.
The final level introduces you to Excel coding. It shows you a couple of methods to develop complex applications from scratch.
In the same module, you will learn how to create emails and PowerPoint in seconds, and how to work with directories automatically from your windows.
The course runs for approximately 26.5 hours.
Your learning will be about completing a single project from the beginning, and every new lecture will be deliberate to ensure that you learn a new basic structure that will get you closer to achieving your objectives.
The lectures are broken down into 3-5 minutes of small lectures so that you are not rushed into doing anything that you are uncomfortable with.
3. Microsoft Excel Crash Course – From Beginner to Expert in 6 Hours (Udemy)
This Microsoft series uses Excel 2013 to teach users everything about Excel.
The lectures were created by Todd McLeod and essentially cover everything that we touch.
This training ensures that you can learn Excel quickly and easily.
Todd has been a university professor for more than 20 years, so you will benefit from his wealth of experience.
This course consists of 6.5 hours of content divided into 75 different videos, which means that there will be no video that is too long to follow.
As a beginner, you will learn how to navigate your way around Excel, input and edit entries, and adjust data and information that are displayed in Excel.
After a couple of minutes on the tutorial, you will know how to write formulas and create powerful functions on Excel.
This course lets you download all the Excel projects that you use in the course of learning and it also grants you access to lots of free templates.
You will be given a certificate of completion at the end of the course as proof that you took part in it.
The best thing about the course is that you will be given a set of quizzes at the end of every video, so you can refresh your memory.
Once you subscribe to this course, you will be given lifetime access to it, which means that you can leave and come back to the course whenever you want to.
4. Microsoft Excel – Advanced Excel Formulas & Functions (Udemy)
If you are serious about learning Excel, then this advanced Udemy course will be one of the best investments you can make for yourself.
Don’t mind that it is called Advanced Excel; you can take this course even if you have no previous knowledge about Excel, but are aspiring to be an Excel pro in a matter of weeks.
The primary focus of the course is to give you a deeper understanding of Excel formulas and functions that turn ordinary spreadsheets into powerful analytics machines.
This course doesn’t take the route that most Excel courses take where they only teach you what the formulas do. This course uses advanced instances to teach you how to apply these formulas and also show you the different ways they can be applied.
At the end of the course, you will be able to build dynamic Excel dashboards to process data, design your own Excel formatting rule, combine datasets from different sources, and automate tasks that are normally difficult and time-consuming.
This 9.5-hour tutorial has four downloadable resources, a certificate of completion, and you can access it on your TV or mobile devices.
The author, Chris Dutton, has successfully taught around 800,000 students across more than a hundred countries, so you can be certain that he knows what he is doing.
5. The Ultimate Excel Programmer Course (Udemy)
This course will teach you how to set up Excel and make it do what you want it to do for you.
It is not entirely a beginner’s course, but if you know your way around the basics of Excel, like how to click on cells and type in them, then you are good to go.
You will learn how to design your own custom forms from scratch so that you can make quick edits to your data table.
This course is built around making you understand how VBA works using the simplest tricks that you will not find anywhere else.
The course is about 31 hours of on-demand videos and it has 45 downloadable resources that you can access on your TV or mobile device.
Each lecture is short so that you do not get overwhelmed with a lot of information before you try them out, but they are info-packed to make sure you do not miss out on learning at least one new skill before you finish watching any lesson.
The course does not cover super-advanced reporting tools, but at the end of it, you will be able to handle Excel automation tools and transform your spreadsheets without help from anybody.
6. Free Excel Essential Training (LinkedIn Learning – Lynda)
Dennis Taylor created this Excel program to teach students and graduates how to work with multiple worksheets, create pivot tables and charts, and do speedy calculations.
Since LinkedIn acquired the educational platform Lynda, it has become one of the best places for online learning like Udemy.
Learning Excel on LinkedIn is great, but one thing that will excite you more is that when you pay for a subscription on the LinkedIn learning platform, you pay for access to all their courses for a month.
That means that if you are fast enough, you can learn more than one new skill for a bargain.
The first month of learning is free, so you can sign up to learn Excel on LinkedIn and not even spend a dime.
A great part of learning on LinkedIn is that it is perfect for Jobseekers. LinkedIn is one of the few social media platforms where you will find employers actively scouting for potential hires.
Imagine that you want to find a job in a different field as a supply chain analyst, you can’t go up to a potential employee and not know how to use Excel for tracking and analysis.
Taking this Excel course on LinkedIn will add a badge to your profile, so the recruiters are already aware of your skills even before they invite you to an interview.
7. Excel Skills for Business Certification (Macquarie University – Coursera)
This Coursera course targets those who want to develop workplace skills in spreadsheet software.
It was designed to teach you the fundamentals and the most critical parts of Excel so that you can confidently operate on tasks that require data collection and analysis and grow your portfolio.
The course is broken down into four smaller units and the scheme Is tailored to develop Excel skills for business purposes.
At the end of the course, participants will be able to create sophisticated data tables and dashboards, as well as execute complex calculations with the use of Excel’s advanced options and techniques.
Learners will learn how to handle a voluminous amount of data, clean and sort the data, extract useful predictions and information from it, and present them using various visualization aids.
The course also teaches learners how to validate data to minimize the chances of error. Learners will discover how to create various automation functions that they can use to input multiple entries to create viable forecast models.
Once you subscribe to a course that is part of a specialization, you will be fully subscribed to all the courses in this specialization for the duration that you paid for.
You can just complete one course under the specialization and then pause or cancel your subscription once you have completed it, or you can move on to the other courses without paying any additional fees.
The courses include hands-on projects that run side by side with them and you will obtain a certificate for every course that you complete.
8. Data Visualization with Advanced Excel (PwC – Coursera)
Being able to perform simple and complex calculations in Excel with huge datasets is fantastic, but learning to show your prediction models and forecasts with visualization aids is just as important.
This free course teaches you how to use PowerPivot to create databases and show clean data models.
It utilizes some of Excel’s best built-in tools like goal speaker, solver, and data tables to teach learners how to perform simulations and scenario-based analysis.
You will also learn how to present data using various visualization and dashboard features to tell the story of a data’s journey.
You will learn to leverage these tools to build complex graphs, power report charts, and combine them to manage dynamic dashboards.
The course requires that you have a basic knowledge of Excel because right from the first week, you will learn how to use datasets and database keys to develop your own data model.
After the first week, you will be able to use PowerPivot to import and prepare data to develop a powerful model.
You will also learn how to model different scenarios, deal with data uncertainties, and you will have the opportunity to practice on an Excel worksheet in the course of the training.
9. Microsoft Excel Classes – Basic & Advanced (GoSkills)
GoSkills put together a pretty decent course that will help you quickly go from an Excel novice to a professional in the shortest time possible.
The course is designed to help you acquire Excel skills that are applicable in real life and use in the day-to-day business world.
At the end of this course, you will be able to scale through simple and advanced Excel tasks and you will be issued a certificate that you can show to your employers to prove your competence.
More than 100,000 people have already enrolled and completed this course where they learned how to be faster Excel users to boost productivity in their business and personal lives.
The course teaches you how to perform basic and complex mathematical and statistical calculations, sort and filter data to quickly find the exact elements that you are looking for, and use pivot tables to present data visualizations.
10. Online Excel Classes (Trump Excel)
Trump Excel is a platform where you can learn Excel for free without even signing up.
The platform uses more than 12 hours of video lessons to turn complete Excel beginners and intermediate users into professionals.
Once you land on the page, you do not need to fill in any information about yourself. Just scroll down and you will find the lessons.
To get the most out of these lessons, it will be best if you follow them in sequential order because all the videos have been deliberately put in the position that they are in to ensure that learners get an adequate understanding of a topic before they move to the next one.
Even if you are already an intermediate Excel user, you still have to follow the sequence. The only thing you need to do is scroll through the modules to see what topics you already know so that you can start from where you need to.
11. Excel Essential Training (Office 365)
This is another LinkedIn Learning course, but this time with a different instructor, Dennis Taylor.
In the course, Dennis introduce beginners to the fundamentals of Excel. He goes through how to use Desktop 365 to create new workbooks, format cells, use auto-fills, and insert charts in your spreadsheet.
In this course, you will learn how to use data types as a research tool. With data types, you can quickly see a range of data from a holistic point of view with a single click.
You will also learn how to use another function called ideas to identify trends and patterns so that you can quickly understand what the numbers mean in a large dataset.
Other cool features you will learn how to use include threaded comments, which make co-authoring a lot easier, and dynamic arrays to make better filters.
12. Free Excel Tutorial (Excel Easy)
This page offers free resources on how to use Excel from scratch.
It is divided into modules. The introductory module shows new Excel users the different components of Excel and what they are used for.
The next module teaches learners how to perform simple Excel operations like creating Excel workbooks and templates, managing Excel worksheets, formatting cells, setting data validations, and using different keyboard shortcuts.
The function module shows users how to save time in Excel by using different formulas and functions to execute tasks.
You will also learn how to use different powerful features to sort and analyze data, as well as how to use visual basic for applications.
At the end of the lessons, you can practice what you have learned with different examples at the bottom of each chapter.
13. Microsoft Excel – Data Analysis with Excel Pivot Tables
In this course, Chris Dutton shows learners how to perform data analysis with pivot tables using real-world cases.
This 6.5-hour video course is capable of taking your Excel for data analysis knowledge from zero to expert in record time.
You will learn how to use pivot tables to quickly dig into large data to explore trends and reveal insightful information that will be nearly impossible to spot at first glance.
This course is perfect for you if you are looking at a career in product sales or marketing. Once you have mastered pivot tables and data analysis, you will be able to find different marketing tactics that will drive the strongest conversions to your products.
14. Master Microsoft Excel Macros and Excel VBA
This course by Kyle Pew focuses on Excel macros and Visual Basic for Applications, VBA.
It contains 17 downloadable resources and up to 5 hours of on-demand videos that you can access on TV or on your mobile device.
You will learn macros and VBA best practices so that you can effortlessly automate your day-to-day routine tasks within Excel.
In the course of your lessons, you will take up reasonable projects that you will be expected to execute side-by-side with the corresponding modules.
The next projects will be sequels of the previous ones, so as you learn a new concept with each project, it will be a building block for subsequent ones.
Some of the projects you will encounter include cleaning up multiple worksheets, importing data from external work files, and managing VBA users forms.
15. Introduction to Data Analysis Using Excel by Rice University (Coursera)
This course by Rice University introduces learners to the fundamentals of business statistics and data analysis using Excel.
It consists of 4 modules that progressively take you through essential Excel operations for organizing data and how to use pivot tables to create powerful data models.
16. Ultimate Microsoft Office (Udemy)
You can save money on purchasing an Excel online course if you go for this Udemy course. The course covers all about using the Microsoft Office Suite.
In other words, you can learn Excel and other MS programs, including Word, PowerPoint, and Access.
In particular, the Ultimate Microsoft Office teaches you how to use Excel and other MS Suite programs in Office 365. Over 39,000 students have completed this course, and it has 4.5/5 star ratings to prove its quality.
Since it covers the entire MS Office Suite, the Ultimate Microsoft Office is a relatively bulky course. It contains 625 lecture videos, 122 quizzes, and 21 articles.
However, the lecture videos are concise and straight to the point. They’re not unnecessarily lengthy, and you can complete the course in under 69 hours – less than three days
The course is taught by Simon Sez IT, an MS Office expert with more than 13 years experience. Hence, you don’t get only beginner but also advanced Excel lessons.
You’ll learn how to create workbooks, work with rows, columns, and cells, use PivotTables, and logical & lookup formulas in the beginner lessons.
In the advanced lessons, you’ll learn financial functions, statistical functions, advanced charts, scenario manager, and data bars.
17. Inside Excel (Udemy)
If you need an Excel course that hits the nail on the head, you should consider Inside Excel, taught by Steve McDonald. The course introduces you to 23 essential Excel skills that’ll make you a professional. You should take this course if you want to master Excel.
This course is recommended not for its content alone but also for its affordability. In addition, it’s the perfect course if you have minimal time. You can complete it in less than three hours, despite the lecture videos, support files, and articles.
To take this course, you need Excel 2010 and recent versions. Notably, it’s also optimized for Office 365. However, you need a Windows PC. Using a Mac computer can be challenging since the videos feature Windows OS.
Another requirement for this course is basic Excel knowledge. As mentioned earlier, the course teaches you 23 professional Excel skills. Hence, it’s not a beginner course.
Nevertheless, some of the skills are relatively simple, and you can grasp them even if it’s your first time using Excel. The difficult ones will take you time to comprehend, but they’re remunerative and will help you land jobs.
Last Words
These are our best Microsoft Excel tutorial courses that you can take online.
Some of the free courses here may be sufficient for your needs, but be sure that any penny you spend on the premium lessons will be well worth it.
