1. Introduction

Excel plays such an essential role in today’s world. Learning Excel provides you with an extra instrument to handle data. So knowing free online excel courses too becomes highly beneficial. But before we get into the free online excel courses, let’s understand what is Excel.

Microsoft Excel is a spreadsheet program. It is used to create text, numbers, and formulas, which involves calculations. This is extremely useful for businesses that include recording expenditures, profit and loss, plan budgets, data charts, and other financial results. It is also used in organizations to create charts for resource utilization, team analytics, organizational analytics, etc.

An excel document is called a workbook. The workbook has at least one worksheet, where you can store and calculate data. They are laid out in rows and columns. The intersection of any row and column is called a cell. A cell is where you enter the data. It can accept any substantial amount of text, date formats, numbers, or formula.

You can create or use the formula bar, which calculates anything. This formula bar helps you to search the formula you need or allows you to select the cells in your workbook to calculate the formula.

Excel also offers a wide range of charts to visualize data. There are two different types of charts: Standard Charts and Pivot Charts. A standard chart is the one in which you create it. A pivot chart is a dynamic allowing your data in several ways by choosing the columns and rows.

2. Benefits of Excel

The primary purpose of excel is related to numbers. When you need an increasing (or even small!) volume of data to sort, download, and analyze, Excel makes it a breeze.

Here are a few categories to keep in mind when it comes to implementing Excel for anything related to numbers:

2.1  Calculations

Create a completely personalized Excel calculator by programming your widely used formulae. You just need to punch in your digits that way, and Excel will spit the answer out for you — no elbow grease required.

2.2  Business Analysis

The business analysis takes advantage of the accumulated data to direct decision making. Organizations typically collect data in their daily operations, which may include data on product purchases, website usage, supply costs, insurance claims, etc.

2.3  People Management

You can use Excel as a powerful way of organizing people’s details, whether they are staff, clients, supporters, or attendants in training. 

Personal information can be efficiently stored and retrieved via Excel. For an individual record, a spreadsheet row or column may include name, email address, employee start date, items purchased, subscription status, and last contact.

2.4  Managing Operations

Excel manages the day-to-day operations of many companies.

Often business activities can involve pretty complicated logistics. Inventory flows need to be managed so that operations can operate smoothly – and without overstocking on individual products. That means tracking supplier and customer transactions, listing critical dates and managing times and schedules

2.5  Performance Reporting

Monitoring and reporting performance are a specialized type of business analysis that can be effectively carried out using MS Excel.

A common way of transforming data in an Excel output report is by building a pivot table. You can readily avail extra useful information from the dataset by adding a pivot table and connecting it to the data. Pivot tables have several functions that allow these tasks to be performed.

2.6  Office Administration

Office administrators use Excel to enter and store many of the data subsequently used for accounting and financial reporting, as well as business analysis and reporting on performance.

Excel is useful in office administration, aside from record-keeping to supporting daily tasks such as invoicing, paying bills, and contacting suppliers and customers.

2.7  Strategic Analysis

Concerning Excel applications, strategic research is where business decisions are closely related to the data and formulae on tablets. Excel is applied to guide actions like investment and asset allocations.

As an example, you might decide to take out currency insurance based on an Excel model. Spreadsheet analysis is structured primarily to make business decisions.

2.8  Account Management

Account managers are generally required to be competent users of MS Excel since they receive customer records and need to keep them.

An account manager’s job is to nurture relationships with the business’s existing clients. Key goals are getting customer loyalty and repeating sales. It’s a job form of marketing and a common profession for MBA graduates.

Excel is widely used when handling account details, as it is an easy way to transfer and hold files.

2.9  Project Management

While project managers have access to software for purpose-built project management (PM), an Excel Workbook is often an effective alternative.

Projects are business activities that typically have a budget and dates of start and end. You should put project plans in a workbook, which can then be used to track progress and keep the project on schedule.

2.10  Managing Programs

Excel is an excellent Forum for Program Management. It can be tailored to handle the specific features of a given program. As MS Excel is well known when the time comes, several individuals can easily handle program records and move them on to a new boss.

3. Basic Knowledge of Excel

There are a few basics of Excel which everyone should know. They are:

3.1  Sort Data

We use Spreadsheets for sorting and storing data. For example, if there are contacts of 800 people in your organization and if you need to sort those contacts in Ascending or Descending order, you can use Excel. It can also help you to sort the data in Alphabetical order.

3.2  Remove Duplicates

When you’re dealing with a big dataset, a couple of duplicates can creep in.

Instead of getting bleary-eyed and annoyed by scrolling through the entire spreadsheet and searching for it yourself, Excel will do all the legwork for you and delete duplicates with a click of a button.

3.3  Basic Math Functions

Excel can manage all kinds of functions for you. You will just need to select the data and add the formulas. You can perform essential functions like:

• Addition
• Subtraction
• Multiplication
• Division
• Average

3.4  Freeze Panes

It sounds irritating while working in the Spreadsheets if you have to go back to the top to see what your column headers are. Excel allows you to freeze panes, which help you to make your column headers and row numbers stay where they are — that means you can always see them, no matter how far down the table you ‘re going. You can achieve this by using the helpful “freeze panes” feature in Excel.

3.5  Insert Current Date

It’s annoying to always glance at your calendar at the bottom of your screen to get today’s date or time. Excel can do that for you, with just a click. Place your cursor in the cell where you want the date to appear. Use that shortcut, and Excel will fill out today’s date automatically for you.

3.6  Same Change across Worksheets

When you deal with several tabs, it’s a hassle combing through all of them and making the same adjustment over and over. Luckily you just don’t have to!

In your workbook, you can pick the corresponding sheets where the change will appear. Make the change once, and it will apply across all the sheets you’ve selected.

4. Top Ten Free Online Excel Courses for Beginners

4.1  Udemy Microsoft Excel for Beginners

Udemy designed this course in Microsoft 2016. This course helps to understand the standard terms used in Excel. You need to know how to use a PC or desktop to take this course.

You can access this free online excel course here.

4.2  Lynda’s Free Excel Essential Training

Lynda designed this course along with Dennis Taylor for mastering Excel. You can learn the basics and the usage of IF, VLOOKUP, and COUNTIF functions in this course. Dennis explains the benefits of creating and managing spreadsheets in Excel.

You can access the course here.

4.3  TrumpExcel Free Online Training

TrumExcel allows you to learn Excel, which will be a perfect start. You don’t have to sign-up to get entry to the course or do something. Simply scroll down and start watching Excel videos.

Please go through these Excel training videos in the given order to make the most of this free workout. I also split those into seven modules.

You can access the course here.

4.4  Coursera Excel Courses for Beginners

Coursera offers a wide range of courses for Beginner on Excel. This course will enable you to navigate the Excel user interface comfortably, enter, manipulate, and format data. Analyze data and present the results in a user-friendly manner. Create charts and tables that sum up raw data effectively.

Develop spreadsheets that are simple to use. Validate the data, locate errors, and correct them. Having large workbook navigation aids.

You can access the course here.

4.5  Free Excel Crash Course by CFI

CFI will teach you the basics of Excel, along with the tips, tricks, shortcuts, functions, and formulas. This free Excel course is specifically designed for users of spreadsheets who are already performing professional financial analysis and financial modeling or are looking to prepare for a career in the wall streets. Take CFI ‘s Excel Crash Course to push your career forward now!

4.6  Microsoft Excel Course by Alison

Alison offers this free online Microsoft Excel 2010. The design course is such to give you a thorough understanding of Excel and its key applications. Microsoft Excel 2010 is one of the most popular software applications, most businesses and individuals use worldwide. Whether you’re a beginner or a middle user, this course will teach you all the tips and tricks you need to boost your productivity in a short period.

You can access the course here.

4.7  Edx Courses for Microsoft Excel

EdX offers real college courses from Harvard, MIT, and more of the world’s leading organizations. You can learn the basics of Excel, to help visualize and gain insights into your data.

You can access this free online excel courses here.

4.8  Introduction to Data Analysis by Rice University

Microsoft Excel, along with Sharad Borle, designed this course as a perfect learning tool. It is designed for all those who wanted to have basic knowledge of Excel.

You can access the course here.

4.9  GoSkills Free Online Excel Courses

This design of accessible GoSkills online training is such to teach you the core techniques and functions in Excel. Some of the core topics include mathematics, statistics, logic and text functions, organizing data by sorting and filtering, presenting your data effectively in multiple chart formats, and more. Upon completion of the lessons, you will be well equipped with the skills necessary to boost your career.

You can access the course here.

4.10  Coursera Data Visualization Course

Coursera, along with PWC, designed this course to guide you to build databases and data models. We’ll show you how to perform different scenarios and simulation analyses, and you’ll get an opportunity to practice these skills by leveraging some of Excel’s built-in tools, including solver, data tables, scenario manager, and goal search. The second half of the course will cover how to view data, tell a story, and explore data by reviewing core data visualization principles.

You can access the course here.

5. My Great Learning

It is an online learning platform that offers various purses. It provides free excel training online 2022. This online excel course for free will help the students to deal with data analytics, data visualization, data wrangling, and many more. Learners will learn to build graphs and presentations using formulas and functions in excel. The course duration is 2 hours and the course will start with an introduction to excel. And then it will teach various features of excel. Once the learners complete this excel training online, they will be required to take up an online quiz. A certificate of completion will be given for this course.

6. Free code camp

 

It is a donor support non-profit organization that is offering various courses for free. This website has about 9000 courses and tutorials and offers free excel training online 2022. It is created with the intention of helping students to learn coding and various other courses for free. They offer a number of excel courses online free. Some of them are

• Microsoft excel tutorial
• Excel Formulas – Basic function for beginners
• Excel shortcuts – Keyboard shortcuts for beginners
• 11 free excel training courses online – Recommended

And many more specific courses related to excel are available on this website. Thousands of videos, articles and interactive lessons are free to learners.

7. Qling

It is another online learning platform that offers free excel training online 2022. The course is called excel essentials. They are also offering many courses in excel such as excel in a minute, excel masterclass, managing data in excel and many more.  They are passionate about meeting the learning needs of their clients by providing quality courses. This excel essentials course deals with 3 main challenges faced in the data flow. They are data input, data processing, and data presentation. This free excel online course contains short lessons for a quick understanding, personalized feedback, a certificate of completion, and many more. 

8. My Excel Online

This platform offers 20+ hours of free excel training online 2022. This excel training online will help any beginners to become a pro in excel. It totally consists of 77 lessons. And the most important thing is no signup is needed to learn this course. All one needs to do is go to the website, myexcelonline.com, and start scrolling and learning. This course will be helpful for both complete beginners and those who are looking forward to levelling up their skills. Among those excel courses online free, this will help the learners to increase their speed in excel. The course also gives a free pdf of 333 excel keyboard shortcuts.

9. Excel exposure

It is an online platform that offers both premium and free excel training online 2022. This platform also provides a free master workbook for students to practice during their course. The provider of this course is Ben Currier who has about 15 years of experience in the field of finance and accounting. He is offering these excel courses as they are helping a lot of businesses to grow. This free excel training online includes many tutorials and video lessons on excel. They have also given a course plan which will make it easier for students to follow this course. The lessons are grouped into beginner, intermediate, and advanced based on their complexity.

Recommended Reads:-

• Top 10 Advanced Excel Courses in India
• Top 30 Advanced Excel Interview Questions and Answers
• 15 Best Advanced Excel Course in Delhi
• Benefits of Taking a Advanced Excel Course in 2023

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