Introduction to Excel

Course Overview:

Using their own licensed version of Excel, learners will discover why this tool is one of the most-used by professionals and analysts in today’s workplace. After an introduction to Excel’s basic features, learners will, clean, explore, and manipulate data. By the end of this program, students will be able to outline use cases for Excel, wrangle data, and build static and interactive data visualizations.

Prerequisite:

No background in math or data analysis is required, but we recommend that students have some familiarity with Excel.

Audience:

Topic 1: Excel Feature Overview

• Understanding Microsoft Excel’s core features and limits
• Performing basic calculations
• Working with data tables

Topic 2: Cleaning a dataset

• Using basic functions to check for missing values
• Identifying and handling NAs
• Manipulating text data

Topic 3: Wrangling a dataset

• Formatting different types of data
• Aggregating data and basic table lookups
• Testing for conditions
• Using table lookup functions

Topic 4: Merging and visualizing tabular data

• Calculating summary statistics
• Merging data using table lookup functions
• Auditing formulas and fixing errors
• Creating simple pivot tables

Topic 5: Introduction to data visualization

• Understanding the importance of visualization
• Creating a complex pivot table with conditional formatting
• Using PivotCharts and interactive elements for visualization
• Creating univariate plots: histograms and box plots

Topic 6: Advanced visualizations in Excel

• Visualizing data for comparison
• Creating line charts and area charts
• Using advanced conditional formatting for tabular data
• Embedding sparklines

Topic 7: Dashboarding in Excel

• Assembling a data dashboard
• Best practices for data visualization
• Introducing the dashboard workshop

Topic 8: Data dashboard workshop

• Solving a data dashboard problem