Excel for Beginners: 2-Hour Crash Course in Formulas, Charts and Pivot Tables by Kevin Stratvert

About this course

Turn messy data into clear answers with a practical Excel crash course built for true beginners. In just two hours, you will go from clicking around the interface to working confidently with everyday spreadsheets used in business, school, and real projects. You will learn how workbooks and worksheets are organized, how to move quickly through data, and how to use helpful on-screen tips and shortcuts so Excel feels less overwhelming from the start.

Instead of memorizing menus, you will practice the skills that make Excel genuinely useful: entering numbers, dates, and times accurately; adjusting column widths and row heights; formatting data so it is readable and reliable; and turning ranges into tables that stay structured as you expand. You will also learn how to find and replace values, hide and reveal information cleanly, and use conditional formatting to spot trends and exceptions without manual scanning.

As you build confidence, you will start using formulas and the core functions that power most spreadsheets. You will understand how references work, why results change when you copy a formula, and how to avoid common mistakes that slow people down. You will also get hands-on with lookup tools that help connect datasets and retrieve the right value quickly, a skill that is central to reporting and analysis tasks in many roles.

To communicate insights, you will create and format charts, explore built-in analysis suggestions, and learn to sort and filter data for fast decision-making. You will also discover how PivotTables can summarize large lists into clear summaries you can adjust in seconds, helping you report counts, totals, and patterns without rebuilding calculations from scratch.

Finally, you will learn the everyday workflow habits that make Excel feel professional: saving to the cloud for safer access and collaboration, managing multiple sheets, protecting workbooks, tracking version history, and preparing clean printouts with the right page setup, headers, and repeatable titles. By the end, you will be ready to handle common Excel tasks with less friction, more accuracy, and a stronger foundation for advanced analytics.