Excel is among the most popular tools among organizations. It helps companies organize and analyze their data more efficiently. If you’ve read about data analysis, you must’ve heard of MS Excel. Even though this tool seems simple, it has many advanced features and applications. Learning about those implementations is crucial to using this software for data analysis. 

To help you understand how you can use Excel effectively to perform data analysis, we have launched free Excel courses under our new upGrad Free Courses. You only have to head to the upGrad’s Data Science Free Courses page, select your desired course, click on Register, and complete the registration process.

Join me in exploring the Excel free online course, a transformative learning experience that equips you with practical skills and positions you as a valuable asset in today’s competitive job market. This course serves as a stepping stone toward unlocking new possibilities and shaping a successful career journey. 

You can also consider doing our Python Bootcamp course from upGrad to upskill your career. 

You can also consider doing our Python Bootcamp course from upGrad to upskill your career.

What is Excel?

Excel is most commonly used in the business world. You can be from any domain or industry, the data would be stored in Excel in most times. It is easy, shareable and has lots of features. The below mentioned are the advantages of using Excel-

1. Stores data
2. Performs Calculations 
3. Data Visualisation 
4. Shareable
5. Account Management
6. Operations Management
7. Clean and sorted data features
8. Various function keys

Micro, Medium, and Macro companies also use excel to store, manage and administrate their data.  The benefit of knowing excel is that it betters the chances of employment. There are certain skills which are employers look for and are prerequisites for the job and excel is one of those.

Why Learn Excel?

Excel is the foundational tool to perform data analysis. Organizations always look for the most skilled candidates while hiring, and having Excel as a skill in your CV would undoubtedly help you. Excel has many advanced features, but at its core, it’s the most straightforward software to perform data analysis.

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Almost all the significant analysis firms such as Mu Sigma and McKinsey use Excel sheets for their data requirements. Excel allows you to learn the fundamentals of data analysis much quicker, and you can apply what you learned to more advanced technologies as well. If you want to enter the field of data science and analytics, you must start with MS Excel. 

Excel makes the work much easier because of its vast set of features. The data can be easily put, modified, shared, visualised, tallied, counted, verified and whatnot! Someone having the skills of excel gets extra recognition because they can work with data as nobody else can. And this recognition opens the door for more opportunities. Also, someone in their career seeking promotions, and utilise this to the very best. It is a much easier, faster, and more reliable tool to manage multiple tasks.

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Why choose Excel free courses from upGrad?

There are many advantages to joining our excel free online course. In the following points, we’ll share some of those highlights to help you remove any doubts regarding the course:

Cutting Edge Content

The content of the course is a product of leading data scientists and professionals. The high-quality content ensures that you learn the concepts step-by-step sequentially. The curriculum is up to the industry standards as the content is of dynamic nature and so are the relevant examples given. The curriculum and the learning do not follow rote learning but interactive learning as there would be certain questions asked during the course that you are supposed to answer or solve.

Industry Relevant Curriculum

The curriculum of the course is industry relevant. What does that mean? It means that the examples curriculum and features taught are up to the market standards and requirements. The examples which are used are also recent and relatable examples rather than the traditional ones. Along with that, the taught curriculum is structured in such a way that the learnings can be easily used in the working environment. This is also why the course by upGrad is considered as one of the top free excel courses.

Free Certificate

After you complete the Excel course, you’ll get a certificate of completion. The certificate would surely help your resume and inform recruiters about your expertise in Excel. The advantage of having a free certificate is that it provides legibility to your claim made on the CV that you know in excel. Also, the free certificate is easily shareable which means that you could share the certificate on professional networking sites like LinkedIn and showcase your skill to potential employers and your network. Along with that, the free certificate is a self-confidence booster, you feel confident as a professional which adds up to your positive attitude.

The best thing about our Excel course is that it’s available for free. You don’t have to spend a dime on Starting to learn Excel for data analysis. Now that we’ve discussed why this course is beneficial for you, let’s talk about its contents:

What Will You Learn?

MS Excel is probably the most popular data analysis tool. Learning this technology is vital to becoming a data analyst. Not only does it help you perform data analysis by itself, but it also enables you to use other data analysis tools with ease.

Our course covers the basic and advanced concepts of data analysis in Excel. The course allows you to learn Excel for free. After its completion, you’d know how to perform data analysis by using MS Excel. Below is the list of free courses available:

1. Introduction to Data Analysis using Excel
2. Analyzing Patterns in Data and Storytelling
3. Exploratory Data Analysis in Excel

The course lasts for four weeks, and you’d only have to invest 30 minutes per day during this period to learn Excel for free. Let’s explore each one of our course’s sections in detail:

Introduction to Data Analysis using Excel

In this course, you’d learn how. You’d see how you can use Excel to perform data analysis in your everyday life. At its core, Excel is simply a spreadsheet tool that allows you to create and modify the same.

You can use it to organize data properly so you can access it with ease and perform operations on it. MS Excel has many features and tools that you can use to perform data analysis. Understanding the basic concepts of MS Excel and its application in data analysis is essential as it will help you build the necessary foundation for learning more advanced concepts.

This course will help you understand these concepts through real-life examples of your daily life. You’d learn the primary uses of Excel and how you can store data in it efficiently. Knowing how to use Excel for storing data is vital because proper data arrangement helps in pattern recognition, which we’ll explore in the next section of our course. 

You will get to learn about understanding the excel interface, slicing and dicing the data as to how to filter it, and report creation using formatting, and by the end of the session, you would be having certain practice questions. Along with that, you would also get to learn data analysis using various functions, cell reference, creation of various types of charts, filters, VLOOKUP, and lastly another set of practice questions to be solved. That is why this excel free online course is interesting and beneficial to learn.

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Analyzing Patterns in Data and Storytelling

In this course, you’ll learn how to analyze patterns from the data present in your input. One of the crucial steps of data analysis is recognizing patterns in your dataset. Pattern recognition helps you generate insights. You’d get to learn the basics of pattern recognition and research in this course.

You should know what kind of patterns are possible in data and how you can use them to perform data analysis.

However, your generated insights would go in vain if you can’t share them with others. One of the most significant aspects of successful data analysis is how you convey your insights. You might be excellent at recognizing patterns in your dataset and generating insights from them, but if you don’t know how to share your findings with others, your effort will go wasted.

That’s why you’ll learn storytelling in our Excel online course for free. Learning storytelling will help you understand how you can convey data to others as a comprehensible narrative. A skilled data analyst doesn’t have to rely solely on charts or numbers. Storytelling in data analysis has many aspects.

You should know how to find a compelling narrative, understand your audience, remain objective, and keep many factors in mind while sharing your insights.

In this free excel course, you would get to learn how to draw insights, different analysis approaches, what are pyramid principles, logical flows, demonstration of insights, etc. Along with that, there would be equal emphasis on the visualisation of the data,  quantitative and qualitative data, and approach to performing visualisation, storyboarding, etc. There would be many more topics that would be taught and interestingly all of these topics are having the practice questions which are of use while learning online. This opportunity to learn excel for free must be utilised at the earliest.

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Exploratory Data Analysis in Excel

This course will help you get insights on how to perform exploratory analysis in Excel. It will  teach you the techniques to display data such that it provides interesting insights.

EDA i.e. Exploratory Data Analysis, is the process of investigating data to discover anomalies, and patterns and to check the assumptions through graphical representations and summary statistics. You can say that it’s an advanced method of performing the tasks we have discussed in our course so far. 

It explores data graphically in Excel through scatter plots, box plots, histograms, and bar charts. EDA is crucial to help you generate insights from your data. It provides you with a much more efficient and quicker way to explore your data to ensure you don’t miss anything.

By the end of this course, you’d be familiar with exploring your data through EDA in Excel and generateing valuable insights much more quickly and easily. 

Along with that, this course would be focusing on the data sourcing from private, and public sources, univariate analysis, data cleansing, segmented univariate, derived metrics, etc. Also, the topics are covered in layers where under on broader topic several multiple topics are covered, which gives an opportunity to learn excel at a much deeper level and also to utilise the concepts in practical life. In this course as well, there would be practice questions to learn the concepts in a much clearer way.

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How to Start

As you can see, our course covers all the concepts you need to start performing data analysis with MS Excel. To begin your learning journey and take part in this program, you can follow these steps:

• Head to the upGrad Free Courses section
• Select the “Getting Started with course of your choice.
• Click the “Register” button
• Complete the registration process

That’s it. After completing these steps, you can start learning Excel’s fundamentals and its applications in data analysis. These courses will give you the necessary foundation to learn more advanced concepts later on. Head to our upGrad Free Courses page and enroll in these courses today. 

Conclusion 

Embarking on the Excel free online course has been enlightening, unraveling data analysis intricacies. As a mid-career professional, I’ve discovered Excel’s pivotal role across industries, making it indispensable for my career growth. Mastering Excel extends beyond fundamentals, impacting data management, analysis, and visualization. The pattern recognition, storytelling, and exploratory data analysis modules empower me to derive effective insights. upGrad’s expert-curated content ensures dynamic learning, offering industry-relevant insights and a free certificate for my credibility.

The courses, requiring just 30 minutes daily, make Excel proficiency seamless for me. Practical examples and hands-on questions ensure my holistic understanding. I’m seizing the opportunity to upskill with upGrad’s Excel course for enhanced career prospects, making my journey both rewarding and impactful. 

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