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Macquarie University

Excel Skills for Business: Essentials

Macquarie University via Coursera

Overview

Prepare for a new career with $100 off Coursera Plus
Gear up for jobs in high-demand fields: data analytics, digital marketing, and more.
In this first course of the specialization Excel Skills for Business, you will learn the essentials of Microsoft Excel. Within six weeks, you will be able to expertly navigate the Excel user interface, perform basic calculations with formulas and functions, professionally format spreadsheets, and create visualizations of data through charts and graphs.

Whether you are self-taught and want to fill in the gaps for better efficiency and productivity, or whether you have never used Excel before, this course will set you up with a solid foundation to become a confident user and develop more advanced skills in later courses.

The best way to learn Excel is to use Excel. In this course, learners will solve a broad range of business problems as they apply the Excel skills and techniques they learn along the way. This course uses downloadable Excel workbooks and full data sets with applied examples and practical challenge exercises. This provides learners with countless opportunities to practice their Excel skills while discovering new and useful productivity features of Excel for a variety of business contexts.

Spreadsheet software is one of the most ubiquitous pieces of software used in workplaces across the world. Learning to confidently operate this software means adding a highly valuable asset to your employability portfolio. At a time when digital skills jobs are growing much faster than non-digital jobs, make sure to position yourself ahead of the rest by adding Excel skills to your employment portfolio.

Syllabus

  • Critical Core of Excel
    • In this module, you will learn about key foundational features of Excel: The Excel user interface, basic Excel terminology, how to operate essential navigational controls in Excel and how to perform basic data entry with Excel spreadsheets.
  • Performing calculations
    • The syntax of formulas is very important in Excel. In this module, you will get introduced to formulas and functions - learn how to write them, use them to perform calculations and understand the different cell references.
  • Formatting
    • Formatting helps to highlight key messages and make the data presentable. This module covers several formatting tools like font formatting, borders, alignment, number formatting, as well as the Excel styles and themes.
  • Working with Data
    • This module is all about working with data – and making it easy to work with. This week you will learn how you can manage your spreadsheets – find data with Filter and Sort, retrieve and change data using Find and Replace, and use Conditional Formatting to highlight specific data.
  • Printing
    • Sometimes you need to print your spreadsheets and this module will help you with that. Learn how you can optimise your spreadsheet for printing by managing margins, orientation, headers & footers, and more.
  • Charts
    • Charts are one of the most common ways to present data visually. This module walks you through creating and modifying charts in Excel.
  • Final Assessment

Taught by

Dr Yvonne Breyer, Nicky Bull, Dr Prashan S. M. Karunaratne

Reviews

4.4 rating, based on 7 Class Central reviews

4.9 rating at Coursera based on 47967 ratings

Start your review of Excel Skills for Business: Essentials

  • Really great course starting point for your journey to becoming an Excel expert. I truly recommend it.
  • Profile image for Yanyong B
    Yanyong B
    This is a very well organized, excellently presented, top quality course. I highly recommend it. I already know some Excel and regularly use Power Query to query Oracle and SQL Server databases and generate pivot tables. Yet I learned many new thing…
  • embedded a storyline adds interest to the course.

    The instructions are clear and include both Window version and Mac version.

    Have practice, but quizzes are not free.
  • DIFFICULT This course does not have enough explanation and the questions are not simply a review of the material. There are too many questions for each section. It should be revised . If you need to learn Excel, this course will make you feel frus…
  • Syeda Fowzia Nawrin Hoque
    I enjoyed this course very much. And the contents,exercises,assessments all were easy to follow and understand through the instructors amazing guidelines. The basics of excel can be learnt easily from this course. I'm continuing the 2nd course of this excel specialization ant it's a bit hard but the things I'm learning are worth the hardwork.
  • Profile image for Evelyn N
    Evelyn N
    I already know basic Excel but I wanted to brush up on/practice my skills. This course was great for just that. It gave a great overview of the essential capabilities of Excel so I think it would be great for beginner's or those with some experience. Quizzes/Challenges were simple enough to compete yet thorough enough to actually make sure you know the concepts.
  • Anonymous
    Wonderful course, easily explained on the videos and complemented with great quizzes.
    Highly recommend! ;) Almost done with the course and have done all others

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