Microsoft Excel for Office 365 (Desktop or Online): Part 2

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Coursera
Pricing

Paid Course
Languages

English
Certificate

Paid Certificate Available
Duration & workload

10 hours 7 minutes
Sessions

On-Demand
Subtitles

English

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Overview

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Whether you need to crunch numbers for sales, inventory, information technology, human resources, or other organizational purposes and departments, the ability to get the right information to the right people at the right time can create a powerful competitive advantage. After all, the world runs on data more than ever before and that's a trend not likely to change, or even slow down, any time soon. But with so much data available and being created on a nearly constant basis, the ability to make sense of that data becomes more critical and challenging with every passing day. You already know how to get Microsoft® Excel® to perform simple calculations and how to modify your workbooks and worksheets to make them easier to read, interpret, and present to others. But, Excel is capable of doing so much more. To gain a truly competitive edge, you need to be able to extract actionable organizational intelligence from your raw data. In other words, when you have questions about your data, you need to know how to get Excel to provide the answers for you. And that's exactly what this course aims to help you do. This course builds upon the foundational knowledge presented in the Microsoft® Excel® for Office 365™ (Desktop or Online): Part 1 course and will help start you down the road to creating advanced workbooks and worksheets that can help deepen your understanding of organizational intelligence. The ability to analyze massive amounts of data, extract actionable information from it, and present that information to decision makers is at the foundation of a successful organization that is able to compete at a high level. Note: Most Office users perform the majority of their daily tasks using the desktop version of the Office software, so that is the focus of this training. The course material will also enable you to access and effectively utilize many web-based resources provided with your Microsoft 365 subscription. This includes brief coverage of key skills for using Excel for the Web and OneDrive. Helpful notes throughout the material alert you to cases where the online version of the application may function differently from the primary, desktop version. This course may be a useful component in your preparation for the Microsoft Excel (Microsoft 365 Apps): Exam MO-210 and Microsoft Excel Expert (Microsoft 365 Apps): Exam MO-211 certification exams. This course is designed for students who already have foundational knowledge and skills in Excel and who wish to begin taking advantage of some of the higher-level functionality in Excel to analyze and present data. In this course, you will: work with functions, work with lists, analyze data, visualize data with charts, and use PivotTables and PivotCharts. This course requires that you have Microsoft Excel installed on a Windows PC. The course setup instructions provided in the first module of the course go into more detail about the hardware and software requirements.

Syllabus

Working with Functions

You already know how to get Microsoft® Excel® to perform simple calculations to make your job easier. However, manually entering formulas will take you only so far. The most commonly used functions in Excel may not be enough to handle complex data analysis needs. As you progress with Excel, and as you are called upon to provide a deeper understanding of your organization's data to decision makers, you'll need to know how to ask Excel more complex questions about your data and how to get the answers you expect. Of course, the more complex your data analysis tasks are, the more complexity you're likely to need in your formulas and functions. This means that you'll need to know how to "talk" to Excel at a higher level to get the most out of your data. As with mathematics in general, and all forms of computer programming, understanding the language Excel speaks is the key to having productive conversations with Excel and getting the answers you need.

Working with Lists

Organizing and presenting your data in a logical and coherent manner is just as important as working with functions to analyze that data. In this lesson, you will use Microsoft Excel to sort, filter, and subtotal data. These functions, in addition to the functions you have used so far, can help you organize your data for better analysis and presentation.

Analyzing Data

As you progress in learning about the features of Microsoft Excel, you see that many of its features build on the concepts and topics introduced in the previous lessons. You have already seen that data analysis is an integral part of what you can do with Excel. Manipulating raw data for analysis can be done in many ways, and each method has its merits. In this lesson, you will create tables to make reviewing data easier. In addition, you will format data in order to show highs, lows, or trends.

Visualizing Data with Charts

Microsoft® Excel® provides you with powerful features to help you organize and analyze your data. As you become more familiar with these features, you'll find you can ask Excel a vast array of questions and get the answers you need. However, not everyone who you report to or present data to will have the same comfort level or expertise when it comes to viewing worksheets. Viewing information in the form of ranges of data entries is simply not natural for many people. You may find yourself presenting information to large audiences on a regular basis. In these cases, you don't want people scanning lines of data on a worksheet when you're trying to present. You want to give them a simple, easy-to-digest view of relevant data so they can quickly understand what's really important. In short, you need a way to generate visual representations of your data. Excel includes some handy functionality that can convert your raw or analyzed data into visually clear, easy-to-interpret diagrams with just a few steps. Taking the time to understand how this functionality works will give you the ability to generate high-impact visuals to present to nearly any audience, nearly any time, almost instantly.

Using PivotTables and PivotCharts

You've already seen the way Microsoft Excel works and how features such as sorting, filtering, and summary functions can help you drill down into your data to get answers to very specific questions. Although using these features is often a good option for attaining specific answers, these aren't necessarily the best options if you need to frequently change the questions you're asking of your data. To change the question you're asking when using functions, sorting, and filtering, you often need to rewrite functions, adjust criteria, or refilter your data; sometimes, you even need to use several of these methods at the same time. You certainly could take this route, but it isn't the most efficient way to re-query your data to get the variety of answers you need. If you work in a high-paced, data-intensive environment, you simply may not have the time needed to recalculate every time a supervisor asks you a different question. You need something a little more dynamic. Excel includes a powerful feature that enables you to ask any number of questions of your data; get detailed, specific answers; and do it all over again in just a matter of moments. By taking advantage of this functionality, you can get critical, time-sensitive organizational intelligence to the people who need it quickly, easily, and with a high level of flexibility.