Microsoft Excel for Complete Beginners w/ Case Studies

UPDATE: Instructor Symon He hosts near daily LIVE office hours on TikTok 10:30PM PDT. Find him @SymonHe.

This is an Excel master course to ramp up a newbie or to advance an intermediate Excel user.  People learn by practicing, not watching videos about technical details. This course is packed with supplemental material for those who learn by practicing, including 10 real world case studies in addition to 260+ course files for practice. Some students may choose to skip to the intermediate and advance sections.

This course is combination of 3-4 courses from their “bootcamps” to quickly ramp people up to perform analyst work in investment, product management, marketing, finance, operations, and business intelligence. Excel is the essential tool to learn in a business world inundated with data and analysis.  In this course, Symon and Travis will start from the very beginning in Excel. 

Symon and Travis began their way of training Excel while attending MBA program at Stanford and University of Chicago. No matter how smart or patient their classmates were, they couldn’t learn Excel fast enough by first memorizing all the technical features in Excel. People learn by immediately applying their skills to business cases. By combining Excel learning with immediate application to business cases, students learned twice as fast and retained newfound expertise in Excel.

Just take a look at our thousands of 5-star reviews from our other courses to see the value and commitment we give to our students.

Sei Im – 5 Stars

“Great examples and practice scenarios! Pacing of the course was great and very easy to understand even at 1.5x”

Brandon Parker – 5 Stars

“I have a lot of experience building excel models and purchased the course for the case studies. I didn’t expect to learn much from the introductory parts but was surprised to find additional keyboard shortcuts I had never learned as well as powerful new functions that will make my life a lot easier. This course helped me brush up on functionality that I often neglected while using excel and was super comprehensive. I look forward to continuing using this course as additional case studies are added and highly recommend it for even excel experts.”

Why Microsoft Excel?

Regardless of role or industry, nearly everyone in business needs to have an ever growing baseline knowledge of Excel for business analysis.

Whether you’re working in sales, finance, marketing, operations, or investments, knowing your way around Excel and being able to turn complex questions into solutions is critical for success.

Whether you’re working for a company or running your own, being able to make better decisions requires you to be able to analyze and interpret data.

What data do you need? How do you prep that data? How do you analyze it to answer specific questions? How do you structure your analysis? How should you visualize your findings?

In this course, we’re going to show you step-by-step, exactly how to do that, by starting with the very basics.

This course is all about Excel and its application in the business world. Why?

Excel is still the most popular tool used by analysts in all industries, across all roles. It’s used by financial analysts, marketing analysts, sales analysts, and of course, data analysts.

Yes, there are many tools out there but if you learn and master the core concepts and techniques of analysis and modeling in Excel, you’ll be able to apply your knowledge to a broad range of applications.

Pankaj Yadav – 5 Stars

“This course is a perfect start for analytics guys…sometimes we work on all hot tools but forget about the basics..so this course can help in clearing all fundamentals.”

Why learn from us?

Both Travis and Symon have been applying and teaching business intelligence, analytics and modeling since our days in business school for over a decade. Our past students and on-the-job trainees have learned best through this combination of technical knowledge and business application.

Travis went to Chicago Booth business school and Symon went to Stanford Business school.

Between Travis and me, we have worked in various roles as analysts, managers, executives, and entrepreneurs across a dozen industries, including real estate, hospitality, software, and consumer products–and thru this course, you’ll become as well versed in Excel as we are.

By enrolling with us, you will be learning from two industry practitioners using Excel for a combined 35 years across a dozen different roles in half a dozen industries.

Travis has been a digital marketer, investor, and entrepreneur for 20 years. He’s led growth in Asia for Groupon and even helped build Excel when he was as an engineer at Microsoft. He is a data analysis and data visualization expert who pulls from his industry experience to teach some of the advanced data analysis topics you’ll find in this course.

Symon has been using Excel for all sorts of analysis and modeling for 15 years. He has served as a financial analyst, marketing analyst, and even head of marketing analytics across half a dozen industries. If you look at his other courses on Udemy, you’ll see that he is an Excel and analysis ninja, having taught over 200,000 students with nearly 20,000 reviews.

Together, we’ve pulled directly from our personal experience and put everything we could into this course. In fact, all of the case studies you’ll find inside are inspired by real-world projects we’ve worked on.

What if I don’t have any Excel background?

No worries! This is why we start with the very basics in our foundational sections, which is designed to get you familiar with Excel before we move on to more advanced topics. You can be a complete beginner and take this course. It might sometimes feel like you’re drinking out of a fire hose, but if you put in the time and effort we promise you’ll see results by following our course and doing the exercises.

We then progressively increase the difficulty as you move along in the course, culminating in advanced techniques taught through our case studies.

If you do have an Excel background, you can skip or skim through the foundational sections and move directly into the more advanced topics.

Dijil Dev Kuniyil Vela… – 5 Stars

“Very informative, and excellent presentation. I can use most of the techniques on a daily basis, and save lot of time on manual checks.”

Learn through practice.

Like most things in life, becoming proficient at using Excel takes practice. A lot of practice.

Sure, you’ll pick up plenty just from watching, but you’ll be doing yourself a disservice if you don’t download our more than 100 plus custom-built Excel practice files specifically designed to help you master the program.

We’re not done adding all our content yet, either. This class was initially created an “intro” course, but it will soon become a complete coverage of all things essential for any analyst looking to master Excel.

In conclusion, does any of the following apply to you?

1. Do you want to really know your way around Excel?

2. You have data for your work or business but you’re not sure what to make of it?

3. You might know your way around Excel but you’re not confident about how to real world techniques

4. You frequently receive Excel spreadsheets from others but want to better understand how they arrived at their conclusions?

5. You want to learn the best practices when it comes to using Excel in business environments

6. You are intimidated by spreadsheets and terms like Pivot Tables and VLookups

7. You want to learn a skill set that is useful for any role in any industry you get into later.

If so, then take charge and take our course.

You have absolutely ZERO risk. Udemy gives you a solid-as-an-oak-tree 30-day money back guarantee. You have nothing to lose and everything to gain.

So if you’re ready to go from Excel noob to Excel ninja, enroll now!