EdX

Excel for Beginners (edX)

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.

Class Deals by MOOC List - Click here and see EdX's Active Discounts, Deals, and Promo Codes.

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

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

Related Courses

Fundamentos de Excel para Negocios (Coursera) Coursera
Universidad Austral

Fundamentos de Excel para Negocios (Coursera)

Cuando finalices este curso habrás logrado un gran número de habilidades como introducir información, ordenarla, manipularla, realizar cálculos de diversa índole (matemáticos, trigonométricos, estadísticos, financieros, ingenieriles, probabilísticos), extraer conclusiones, trabajar con fechas y horas, construir gráficos, imprimir reportes y muchas más.

Jun 22nd 2026
5-12 Weeks
Excel for Everyone: Core Foundations (edX) EdX
The University of British Columbia,UBCx

Excel for Everyone: Core Foundations (edX)

Learn Excel fundamentals including data wrangling, spreadsheet management, and basic data analysis. This introductory Excel course will equip you with a strong foundational knowledge of Excel to organize, analyze and work with data. You will develop essential Excel skills, such as simple data wrangling and managing spreadsheets, along with a foundational understanding of business data analysis.

Self Paced
Self-Paced
Data Analytics in Accounting and Finance (edX) EdX
The Hong Kong Polytechnic University,HKPolyUx

Data Analytics in Accounting and Finance (edX)

Understand key concepts in the data analytics process, along with the practical application of data sets in the accounting and finance context. This data analytics course takes an interdisciplinary approach to describe the data analytics process in the context of accounting and finance. The growing volume of both structured and unstructured data has pushed forward a more data-driven form of decision making in accounting and finance. To get along with the advancements, accountants and finance professionals need to have an analytics mindset to excel in their jobs.

Self Paced
Self-Paced
Introduction to Spreadsheets and Models (Coursera) Coursera
University of Pennsylvania

Introduction to Spreadsheets and Models (Coursera)

The simple spreadsheet is one of the most powerful data analysis tools that exists, and it’s available to almost anyone. Major corporations and small businesses alike use spreadsheet models to determine where key measures of their success are now, and where they are likely to be in the future. But in order to get the most out of a spreadsheet, you have know how to use it. This course is designed to give you an introduction to basic spreadsheet tools and formulas so that you can begin harness the power of spreadsheets to map the data you have now and to predict the data you may have in the future.

Jun 22nd 2026
4 Weeks
Ciencia de Datos Aplicada al Marketing (edX) EdX
Universidad Anáhuac,AnahuacX

Ciencia de Datos Aplicada al Marketing (edX)

Toma decisiones en marketing basadas en los datos. Históricamente las matemáticas nacieron por primera vez, debido a la necesidad de entender nuestro entorno y tomar decisiones. En particular, la ciencia de datos (data science), se enfoca en el procesamiento de datos: analizar, explorar e interpretar conjuntos de datos, y con base en ello, tener un panorama completo del presente.

Self Paced
Self-Paced
The Essentials of Data Literacy Online Course (edX) EdX
Davidson College,DavidsonX

The Essentials of Data Literacy Online Course (edX)

Learn fundamental data skills with an online course that teaches you how to analyze, manage, and visualize data. Audit for free or obtain a certificate. Learn data literacy online using R programming. What is data literacy and why is it important? In this data literacy course, you will learn how to become data literate. This will be accomplished by performing data analysis, data visualization, and communicating with data, using real datasets and examples that are relevant to a variety of audiences and academic disciplines.

Self Paced
Self-Paced
Exploring and Producing Data for Business Decision Making (Coursera) Coursera
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Exploring and Producing Data for Business Decision Making (Coursera)

This course provides an analytical framework to help you evaluate key problems in a structured fashion and will equip you with tools to better manage the uncertainties that pervade and complicate business processes. Specifically, you will be introduced to statistics and how to summarize data and learn concepts of frequency, normal distribution, statistical studies, sampling, and confidence intervals.

Jun 22nd 2026
4 Weeks
Platform-Based Analytics (edX) EdX
Indiana University,IUx

Platform-Based Analytics (edX)

Gain hands-on experience extracting, preparing, exploring, and analyzing data statistically and visually using features and tools native to Microsoft Excel. In an ever-growing digital world, the need for strong data analysis skills is at the forefront of every business function, along with the ability to accurately describe and interpret analytical findings.

Nov 7th 2023
5-12 Weeks
Excel Power Tools for Data Analysis (Coursera) Coursera
Macquarie University

Excel Power Tools for Data Analysis (Coursera)

Welcome to Excel Power Tools for Data Analysis. In this four-week course, we introduce Power Query, Power Pivot and Power BI, three power tools for transforming, analysing and presenting data. Excel's ease and flexibility have long made it a tool of choice for doing data analysis, but it does have some inherent limitations: for one, truly "big" data simply does not fit in a spreadsheet and for another, the process of importing and cleaning data can be a repetitive, time-consuming and error-prone.

Jun 22nd 2026
4 Weeks
Data Visualization and Building Dashboards with Excel and Cognos (edX) EdX
IBM

Data Visualization and Building Dashboards with Excel and Cognos (edX)

Build the fundamental knowledge necessary to use Excel and IBM Cognos Analytics to create data visualizations and to create dashboards containing those visualizations to help tell a lucid story about data. This course provides students with the basics required to create data visualizations and dashboards using both Microsoft Excel and IBM Cognos Analytics.

Self Paced
Self-Paced
Análisis de datos: Llévalo al MAX() (edX) EdX
Delft University of Technology,DelftX

Análisis de datos: Llévalo al MAX() (edX)

Incrementa tus habilidades de análisis de datos utilizando hojas de cálculo y visualización de datos en Excel. Aumenta tu productividad y produce mejores decisiones de negocio. Este curso de análisis de datos (business intelligence: BI) y estadísticas es para todos aquellos que quieren mejorar sus habilidades en el análisis de datos. ¿Buscas una forma inteligente de visualizar los datos para que tengan sentido? ¿Quieres entender esa colección de datos loca que te dio tu jefe? ¿Tienes Megabytes de sensores de datos para analizar? ¡No te preocupes, lo tenemos cubierto!

Self Paced
Self-Paced
Excel avanzado: importación y análisis de datos (edX) EdX
Universitat Politècnica de València,UPValenciaX

Excel avanzado: importación y análisis de datos (edX)

Conoce técnicas y estrategias avanzadas para importar, consolidar y visualizar con Excel datos provenientes de cualquier fuente. En este curso de análisis e interpretación de datos te presentaremos técnicas avanzadas de importación de datos y estrategias diversas para consolidarlos y prepararlos una vez importados de forma que puedas extraer las conclusiones que necesitas (basadas en nuestra experiencia en el uso de Microsoft Excel y demostradas con casos reales).

Self Paced
Self-Paced