Introduction

Welcome to Advanced Excel for Business!

Spreadsheets have incredible power, but most of that power goes unused. Most even so-called experts only use about 10 percent of the functionality in Excel. Many of you probably feel that you already know a lot about Excel, and you probably do! In this course, you are going to learn even more. This book will provide you with an in-depth look at the many tools and features that Excel offers, allowing you to create complex and powerful spreadsheets. We will cover topics such as named ranges, dates and times, charting, conditional formatting and data validation, Goal Seek and Solver, data tables and advanced filtering, PivotTables, financial formulas, advanced decision-making, text manipulation and parsing, lookups that include index and match and the relatively new XLOOKUP function, VBA, and Monte Carlo simulations, among others. By the end of this book, you will have the knowledge and skills to become a master at Excel.

Historically, students have found this class to be very valuable. Spreadsheet skills are very marketable. Interns and graduates regularly report back that knowing spreadsheet magic truly sets them apart from the competition and opens doors for bigger and better opportunities in either their workplaces or their internships. That's what this class is intended to help with! 

I expect that you’ve been exposed to the basics of Excel in the past. For this course, I expect you are already comfortable in Excel and that writing formulas, cutting and pasting values, doing some basic lookups, and other similar tasks are familiar to you. We can't hope to cover everything in Excel, but we can expand the toolset you normally use. There are so many more things you can do! I want to open that up to you so that you have a wider array of options to choose from!

Let’s first cover a few important overview tasks before jumping into the lessons of the course.