Excel Beginner Crash Course – How to Solve Problems in Excel

Non-intimidating Microsoft Excel course for beginners. Learn Beginner Microsoft Excel 2010, Excel 2013, Excel 2016.

If you've ever broken into a cold sweat when opening Excel, then this course is for you.

Join me as we talk about the basic formula creation process and take a look at popular Math and Stat functions.

We won’t be exhausting every Excel tidbit but I’m willing to bet you’ll remember the content in this course. The overarching theme is mastery versus overload and the goal is to get busy people up and running in Excel as quick as possible.

Gone are the days when you're intimidated to to work in Excel. You don't need to know all the crazy things Excel can do to be a top performer at you job.

Even with web apps and the software as a service (SaaS) business model being prevalent as they are, Excel is still used in today’s businesses. Sometimes these expensive web based businesses don’t scale very well to a specific calculation or forecast. Being able to whip up something quickly can be the difference in the perception of job performance.

A great example of this is something that happened at one of my jobs:

I was tasked to show the stats of blocked and allowed emails that were processed by our email filtering system. This system had built-in reporting capabilities but it didn’t present the data very well.

So I imported the data in Excel, separated it nicely, and added charts and graphs. After I setup the data sheet I added another sheet that predicted the amount of emails in each category that would be received within the next 60 days.

Not only was this report a hit with my boss and other management, but I was able to communicate expertise that management didn’t even know I had.

This report opened the opportunity to jump pay grades - all this from spending a little extra time in an Excel.

The point is Excel is more than a simple office program that runs your home budget.

Knowing Excel can be beneficial in your professional career. And I’ll teach you the basics of Excel in this course.

I designed this basic Excel course to be easily understood by absolute beginners. At the end of the course you will understand how to identify and navigate pieces of Excel, how the formula creation process works, how to use popular math and stat functions, and how to use the diagnostic functions to help solve those pesky errors.

Doing well at your current job is dandy, but what about another line of work?

This course will provide a foundation to students who will be taking classes or starting work where Excel use is required. Jobs that use Excel include but are not limited to:

Financial Analyst
Accountant
Business Analyst
and virtually any IT position
That's right. Excel is still popular today.

Other less involved professions may include administrative assistants or simply someone who has inherited someone else’s spreadsheet and needs to be able to quickly jump in.

I'll provide materials to you to help you learn.


The method of teaching is a walkthrough in Excel. I'll provide:

a course workbook (Excel file), both student and instructor versions
visual instruction on Udemy
a course companion manual in PDF form
and other materials to help you learn