Business Metrics with Spreadsheets

Overview

Turn spreadsheets into a powerful decision-making tool. This course covers how to interpret data, calculate essential business metrics, and visualize trends that reveal performance, opportunities, and strategic direction.

Syllabus

Introduction to Data Overview

Discover what data is, where it shows up in everyday life, and why understanding it can help you make smarter decisions across any industry.

What Is Data

Interpret tabular data by identifying what’s being measured, understanding how it’s organized, and recognizing the role of metadata in adding context.

Data Types

Distinguish between different data types—like numerical vs. categorical—and apply the right reasoning based on how the data is structured and measured.

Data Summarization

Summarize datasets using frequencies, measures of center and spread, and descriptive statistics like five-number summaries and tables.

Data Relationships

Explore how values relate using ratios, proportions, and correlations to compare parts and measure connections between variables.

Introduction to Data Review

Wrap up your introduction to data by reviewing key takeaways about structure, types, summaries, and relationships—building confidence for your next steps in analysis.

Business Metrics Overview

Get introduced to five major categories of business metrics and explore how companies measure progress toward common goals like growth, efficiency, and innovation.

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

Discover how KPIs track business goals and support strategic decisions through clear, measurable indicators across different departments.

Growth Metrics

Explore common growth metrics like revenue growth rate, market share, and active users—and learn how to calculate, interpret, and apply them to track business expansion.

Efficiency Metrics

Explore how time, cost, and resource-based metrics help evaluate and improve a company’s operational efficiency.

Profitability Metrics

Understand how gross margin, net earnings, EBITDA, and CLV reveal how well a business turns revenue into profit.

Customer Satisfaction Metrics

Evaluate customer happiness and loyalty using metrics like CSAT, churn rate, and repeat purchase rate.

Innovation Metrics

Track how a business develops and adopts new ideas using metrics like product output, adoption rates, and R&D investment.

Financial Statements

Learn how to read and interpret the income statement, cash flow statement, and balance sheet to assess a company’s profitability, liquidity, and overall financial health.

Business Metrics Review

Wrap up your understanding of business metrics with a recap of KPI categories, goal types, and the financial statements that help companies track performance across the board.

Introduction to Spreadsheets Overview

Get introduced to the history and power of spreadsheets, explore their core features, and see why they’re essential tools for data analysis—no matter which application you choose to use.

Spreadsheet Navigation

Get comfortable navigating spreadsheet interfaces, using menus, toolbars, and shortcuts to organize data and perform key operations efficiently.

Locating and Identifying Data in Spreadsheets

Master the use of cell references in spreadsheets, including relative vs. absolute references and named ranges, to write clearer formulas and manage data across sheets.

Spreadsheet Operations

Perform essential spreadsheet operations like sorting, filtering, copying, and deleting to keep your data clean, organized, and ready for analysis or presentation.

Introduction to Spreadsheets Review

Wrap up your introduction to spreadsheets by reinforcing key concepts like cells, rows, and columns—plus gain confidence in building, editing, and saving your own spreadsheets.

Spreadsheet Data Analysis Overview

Get oriented to the process of analyzing data in spreadsheets, from cleaning messy inputs to asking meaningful questions that turn raw information into actionable insight.

Math and Text in Spreadsheets

Build and troubleshoot formulas that calculate values, manipulate text, and combine cell references to clean and analyze spreadsheet data.

Logic and Aggregation in Spreadsheets

Apply logic and condition-based calculations using functions like IF, AND, and COUNTIFS to filter, aggregate, and clean spreadsheet data based on custom rules.

Dates, Validation, and Worksheet Operations in Spreadsheets

Work with dates and clean tabular data using spreadsheet tools for extraction, validation, deduplication, and text splitting to prepare datasets for analysis.

Reference and Summarization in Spreadsheets

Retrieve reference data and summarize large datasets using lookup functions and pivot tables for efficient spreadsheet analysis.

Spreadsheet Data Analysis Review

Wrap up your journey through spreadsheet data analysis by reviewing key techniques for cleaning, transforming, and querying data—all in service of answering real-world questions.

Spreadsheet Data Visualization Overview

Explore how charts can bring your data to life. This overview sets the stage for creating pie charts, bar charts, line graphs, and more—so you can spot trends and communicate clearly.

Introduction to Pie Charts

Understand when pie charts work best for showing part-to-whole comparisons and recognize common pitfalls that make them less effective.

Pie Charts in Spreadsheets

Create and format pie charts in spreadsheets to highlight how categories contribute to a whole, adjusting labels, formatting, and layout for clear and accurate presentation.

Introduction to Bar and Column Charts

Interpret and choose between bar and column charts to compare categorical data, understanding when to use grouped or stacked formats to highlight relationships and category differences.

Bar and Column Charts in Spreadsheets

Create and customize bar and column charts in spreadsheets to compare categories, format axes and labels for clarity, and display grouped or stacked layouts for multi-dimensional data.

Introduction to Line and Area Charts

Understand how line and area charts reveal trends over time, compare categories, and represent parts of a whole, while recognizing when these chart types are appropriate or potentially misleading.

Line and Area Charts in Spreadsheets

Create and customize line and area charts in spreadsheets to visualize trends, compare series, and highlight data patterns with clear formatting and multiple data series.

Introduction to Scatter Plots

Interpret scatter plots to explore relationships between two numerical variables, assess correlation strength and direction, and spot clusters, trends, or outliers.

Scatter Plots in Spreadsheets

Create and customize scatter plots in spreadsheets to reveal patterns, spot outliers, and explore potential correlations between two numerical variables.

Introduction to Histograms

Learn how values are distributed across ranges, estimate variability, and spot outliers using histograms to interpret the shape and spread of numerical data.

Histograms in Spreadsheets

Create and customize histogram charts in spreadsheets to visualize how numerical data is distributed, spot frequency patterns, and identify variability or outliers.

Choosing Appropriate Spreadsheet Visualizations

Choose the right chart type for your data and refine its design to clearly communicate trends, comparisons, and distributions to your audience.

Spreadsheet Data Visualization Review

Wrap up your charting journey by reinforcing key takeaways—from choosing the right chart type to formatting it for clarity and impact—all using spreadsheet tools.

Analyze Profits for E-commerce Company

Analyze real ecommerce financial data, build key business metrics in spreadsheets, and create a presentation to showcase solutions for increasing company profits.