Knowing how to use Microsoft Excel can be extremely beneficial in one’s career and personal life. At last count, there were 440,000+ active jobs on Indeed.com listing Excel as a necessary skill. Microsoft Excel is essential in a wide range of professions, like project manager, administrative assistant, data analyst, and accountant (to just name a few). It’s also a useful tool for doing things at home, like keeping track of your household spending or creating a workout plan.
These days, you can learn Excel online at a fraction of the time and cost than previously. Options range from Excel courses that teach you the basics in a couple hours to advanced Excel training that take weeks or months. You can learn Excel for free or purchase a course – but it shouldn’t ever cost you more than $200-300 (and mastering Excel is worth more than that!).
With hundreds of Excel classes to choose from on the internet, it can be hard knowing where to begin. To help narrow your search, we compiled this list of the 10 best online Excel courses. The list includes Excel courses for beginners and experts, as well as Excel courses at a range of different price points.
This Excel learning course is designed and presented by Kyle Pew, a professional lecturer with 10+ years of Excel training. It uses Excel 2013 but virtually all the lessons apply to Excel 2016 and 2019. If you’re looking for a course that covers everything you can do with Excel, then this is it. Depending on your previous understanding of Excel, you can start with basics like formatting cells or skip ahead to complex chapters like working with large sets of data and automating repetitive tasks.
The syllabus comprises:
The Goodwill Community Foundation, or GCF for short, has free courses dealing with a range of essential skills like email, reading, and math. Its free Microsoft Excel course is an excellent starting point for learning the basics of Excel, such as formatting cells, creating formulas and charts, and using functions. Each chapter comprises text, screenshots, and a 3-6 minute video. There’s even a quiz at the end where you can test your knowledge of Excel.
The syllabus comprises:
LinkedIn Learning is one of the best platforms for short courses, as demonstrated by this powerful Excel crash course. The course is presented by Dennis Taylor, a lecturer with 25+ years of Excel experience. Through two hours of video tutorials, Taylor clearly articulates Excel basics from using the quick access toolbar to creating charts. The course includes 11 quizzes and a certificate of completion. It is suitable for anyone needing to use Excel for basic (but not complex) tasks at work.
The syllabus comprises:
So far, we’ve named the best long course for mastering Excel and best short course for Excel basics. This Udemy course fits in between, promising to make you proficient in Excel in just six (well, six-and-a-half) hours of video instruction. The course is led by Todd McLeod, a tenured college professor. It starts off very basic, then quickly ramps up to complex but essential tools like creating pivot tables. It also has bonus skills chapters, including creating a gradebook and creating a loan amortization table.
The syllabus comprises:
Excel Everest is built to further the careers of people in sales, marketing, finance, HR, or product. In contrast to other Excel online courses, Excel Everest actually teaches you inside Excel. After you purchase, you’ll get an email with a link for downloading the program as an add-on into Excel. Inside the course, you’ll find hundreds of embedded exercises categorized as easy, medium, or hard.
The syllabus comprises:
All Coursera ‘specializations’ are offered by top universities, like this Excel course for business from Australia’s Macquarie University. This specialization is made up of four courses which take approximately six months to complete. The specialization ends with a hands-on project to earn a certificate that you can share with employers.
The syllabus comprises:
Excel is an essential tool for data analysis. This isn’t the only online course that teaches all the most important concepts and techniques of data analysis using Excel. However, it is the course with the most original hands-on projects, including analyzing cryptocurrency data and startup funding data. Like the two other Udemy courses on this list, Data Analysis Essentials has a 4.5+ star rating from tens of thousands of students.
The syllabus comprises:
When it comes to financial modeling, there’s theory and then there’s doing it in practice. This Udemy course is great for learning how to create practical financial models for your small business. After completing the course, you will be able to build and leverage financial models to help you make smarter choices about your business venture. The best thing about this course is its simplicity, using a lemonade stand as an example for how to build a financial model.
The syllabus comprises:
You may have noticed there are a lot of Udemy courses on our list – five in total. That’s because Udemy has so many practical Excel online courses, including this one for finance professionals. This is the course for building cash flow statements, building valuation models from scratch, and building P&L statements from raw data extraction. It's relatively long for an online Excel course, but if it’s worth it if you’re aiming to become the top Excel user on your team.
The syllabus comprises:
VBA (Visual Basic for Applications) is an Excel programming language that lets you automate routine tasks with ‘macros’ (rules). If you work in a profession – such as business analyst or financial analyst – that requires you to create lots of models in Excel, then knowing VBA is essential. This course teaches you how to use VBA in a matter of hours. A strong understanding of Excel is essential to learning this course.
The syllabus comprises:
Basics of VBA
Defining variables, constants, and calculations
Adding logic to your VBA code
Debugging your VBA code
Managing workbook elements and data in VBA
Adding advanced elements to your workbook
Using Excel Events in your VBA code
