Best Free Excel Tutorial & Resources - GoSkills Online Courses

Excel is a widely used spreadsheet program. While it’s most popularly known for its ability to make use of heaps of data, Excel has an infinite number of capabilities, from making lists and charts to organizing and tracking information.

Whether you want to do XLOOKUP, COUNTIF, CONCATENATE or simply merge cells, we’ve got you covered with step-by-step guides to the most important tools, formulas, and functions in Excel.

90% of offices use Excel. Getting Excel-certified can be highly beneficial for job seekers. Get certificates in multiple Excel courses to prove your proficiency in Excel.

Learning Microsoft Office has significant benefits for your daily workflow, productivity, and career possibilities. Microsoft Office skills are indispensable across a plethora of industries and professions.

Looking for help with Microsoft Office? Check out our free guides with tips on how to maximize the potential of apps like Word, PowerPoint, Teams, Excel and more!

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Whether you are in HR, Sales, IT, Admin or Support, you need to speak the language of finance. Whether discussing plans, strategy or how well your department is performing, you’ll be conversing in financial terms and numbers.

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Soft skills matter a lot in the workplace. Here’s why. As the workforce grows more dependent on knowledge workers, companies are beginning to see the value in soft skills.

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Become a data analysis pro with our range of expert-led courses. Whether you are a data analytics novice or a numbers whiz, our on-demand courses will help advance your skills at a pace that suits you.

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Everything you need to know to get started with Microsoft Excel.

If you find Excel intimidating, you are not alone.

When it comes to Excel, many of us lack the skills to find the answers we need.

And it’s no secret that subpar Excel abilities could seriously impact your career.

If you work in a non-technical sector, you may wonder why it’s relevant to learn Excel online.

Excel is, in fact, a skill that touches about every profession out there, at every level.

Improving your Excel skills will not only help you get your work done faster, it can also improve your career prospects.

Certified Excel skills have been found to increase the likelihood of promotions and lift earnings by 12% on average compared to the paychecks of non-certified users.

That’s why I learned Excel. And you should too.

Although number crunching is what Excel is known for – its capabilities lie far beyond that. With Excel, you can:

Excel can also help you out in your personal life through expense tracking worksheets, party planning templates, and more.

Interested, but don’t know where to start?

We’ve got you covered.

This overview will guide you through the basics of Excel and teach you how to level up your productivity with key formulas and functions, filtering, macros, and more. We’ve also included 50+ free resources at the end that will help you learn Excel online!

Microsoft Excel is the most widely used spreadsheet program in the world. While it’s most popularly known for its ability to make use of heaps of data, Excel has an infinite number of capabilities, from making lists and charts to organizing and tracking information.

Just about everyone, in so many different ways. Excel is used in virtually every industry, including finance, retail, healthcare, communications, information technology and many more. Excel also comes in handy for personal use to manage your finances, organize your job search, or even plan out a novel! If you’re entirely new to Microsoft Excel, here are some resources you may find useful:

Before you jump into learning cool things like Macros and Power Pivot, it’s important to get your bearings first.

A Microsoft Office Excel workbook is an xlsx (if you’re using Excel 2007+) file that contains one or more worksheets that you can use to organize different types of related information, according to Microsoft.

Worksheets are comprised of a near infinite number of rows and columns, which together create cells.

Cells are where you store your information, such as text, numbers, pictures, dates, times and formulas.

You’ll notice the rows are numbered while the columns are labeled with letters. An example of a cell label (or reference) then is: A2, H5, etc.

To get things done in Excel, you’ll need to understand the Ribbon.

Excel’s quick access toolbar (see screenshot below) gives you one-click access to the tools you use the most in Excel.

You can customize what appears here by clicking on the arrow icon furthest to the right in the left-hand corner.

The ribbon is a collection of icons at the top of your workbook to help you perform specific actions. Think of the ribbon like a hierarchy, where each tab (e.g. Home, Insert, Page Layout) contains a group of commands (e.g. Copy, Paste, Sort, Filter).

Let’s dive deeper into each of these items.

The ribbon (see screenshot) is where you find commands. It’s broken down into clickable tabs, where you’ll find groups of related commands.

It’s important to note that your Excel Ribbon may appear different from my Excel Ribbon. There are a few reasons this could be.

1. Add-ins: Add-ins extend Microsoft Excel’s capabilities, and therefore, require a new tab.

2. Contextual Tabs: There are also contextual tabs – or a tab that appears automatically when you do something specific in Excel.

3. Customization: To make Excel work for you, you can customize your Ribbon, adding and/or removing different tabs.

Depending on which tab you click – home, insert, page layout, etc. – different command groups will appear below.

Excel is a powerful and robust program that allows you to accomplish a myriad of things, such as organizing, analyzing, presenting and even automating your data.

Using spreadsheets is usually a three-step process:

Enter data

Do something with the data

Interpret that data

And occasionally, there is a step four:

Automating the process

Before doing something with your data, try stylizing your spreadsheet so it’s easier to navigate. Here are a few things you should know how to do in Excel.

While formatting is essential for easy reading, it’s not the only benefit of the feature.

Ever heard of conditional formatting? Conditional formatting turns things up a notch by styling cells based on what’s in them.

For example, in the example above, we have a spreadsheet with a list of distilleries and the dates they were founded. If I’m interested in visiting the oldest distilleries, I can use the conditional formatting feature to highlight the oldest three in my sheet.

If Excel doesn’t have the option you want already, you can build your own style.

It’s important to note that the style you choose will be applied to every selected cell, so pay attention to the cells you’re selecting because it may affect how the style appears.

We actually touched on this in an article. Here’s an excerpt:

There’s nothing worse than scrolling through a huge spreadsheet that requires you to continuously go back up to the top to see what your column headers are.

Fortunately, you can make your column headers and your row numbers stay right where they are – meaning you can always see them, no matter how far down the spreadsheet you go. You can do this by using Excel’s handy “freeze panes” feature.

Here’s how you do it:

Scroll down and across your spreadsheet, and you’ll see that the information you need is always right there within view!

One of the reasons Excel is so widely used in the business world is because it allows you to do advanced calculations and build business intelligence solutions out of it.

In order to do that, you need to understand formulas and functions. Formulas are the most basic way to do math in Excel.

Each formula begins with an “=” sign. How you begin each formula

If you want to add two numbers, you’d use the “+” sign. Add numbers

If you want to subtract two numbers, you’d use the “-” sign. Subtract numbers

If you want to multiply two numbers, you’d use the “*” sign. Multiply numbers

And if you want to divide two numbers, you’d use the “/” sign. Divide numbers

You can do what I did above – input the exact numbers – but that isn’t the optimal solution. Why? Because then you can’t copy and paste that formula into the remaining cells because the formula is hard-coded with numbers.

Here’s what I should’ve done instead:

Notice how I input the cell references instead of the actual numbers.

What if you want to do more complex math though? How would you do it?

Well, you’d utilize functions. Functions, which are categorized by functionality, are just predefined formulas. Here are some of the most common ones. You can find the full list here and also here.

Now that you have your data, you have to interpret it.

The thing is: it’s difficult to make sense of messy data. So you’ll need to visualize it first.

Here are a few ways you can make your data look better.

If you want to sort your data by column/category to make it more presentable, here’s how.

Well, you can do that. Here’s how.

Prepare your data to be sorted

Before you can sort your data, you must make sure that your data is ready to be sorted. Your data is ready to be sorted if the following is true:

How to do single level sorts

How to do multiple level sorts

Multi-level sorts are good for large data sets because you’ll likely want to sort your data by one column and then by another.

Filtering can be very useful for drilling down into data, finding only records that have specific relevance to the situation you are investigating.

To filter out duplicates, again, you must get your data ready to be filtered – make sure:

Filter for specific words

Filter for specific dates

Filter multiple columns

Clear filters in one of three ways

A Pivot Table is almost like a Rubik’s cube because it allows you to mold your data and look at it in different ways.

How to create a PivotTable

How to remove items from a PivotTable

How to modify PivotTables

For more PivotTable tutorials, check out our resources section below.

If you have tasks you need to do over and over again, you should use Macros and Scripts to automate this process.

A macro is a pre-recorded set of actions that you can replay as many times as you want, so you don’t have to manually take those same steps. You can record a macro for some of your most common tasks in Excel, and replay those actions to save you time.

Add the Developer tab to your ribbon (if it is not on your ribbon)

Prepare to record

Record a macro

Run the macro

You can run the macro in any one of three ways:

For more Macros and VBA tutorials, check out our resources section below.

This was a high-level overview, but the possibilities of Excel are endless, so don’t stop here.

We’ve gathered 50+ free Excel resources to keep you moving, including step by step tutorials, keyboard shortcuts, and time-saving templates.

If you’re looking for something more comprehensive, we’ve also included online courses that will help you learn and apply your new skills, fast.

Use these templates, shortcuts, and add-ins to work smarter and save yourself valuable time.

Make use of these Excel tutorials for beginners or those needing a refresher on the essentials.

Once you’ve mastered the basics, try your hand at learning these intermediate and advanced skills.

For more intermediate and advanced resources, see the sections below, organized into specific categories.

Learn how to use one of Excel’s most indispensable tools, the Pivot Table, to analyze and present your data in an understandable way.

Learn how to automate your most repetitive tasks by creating powerful macros with VBA.

Learn data visualization skills to design and build dynamic and beautiful Excel dashboards.

Learn how to use Power Query, a business intelligence tool within Excel that allows you to extract, clean, and reshape your data to prepare it for analysis.

Learn how to use Power Pivot, a business intelligence tool within Excel that allows you to transform large data sets into supercharged tables for data analysis and modeling.

More advanced Excel users who are working with tools like Power Query and Power Pivot to clean and analyze their data may also be interested in Power BI. You can import data from your Excel files into Power BI to build beautiful and interactive reports and dashboards.

We hope the resources above will help you in your quest to learn Excel online. Check out our resources section and sign up for our newsletter to get notified of new articles, tutorials, and webinars.

Ready to learn more about Excel and add a certification to your resume? Browse our online Excel courses today.

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