6 Best Excel Courses 2023: Smart Ways to Easily Master Spreadsheets

Are you looking to upskill and stay ahead of the curve? Excel is a powerful tool that keeps growing in demand. Here, we’ve rounded up the best online courses for learning Excel so you can make sure your skills are up-to-date and ready for any opportunity!

Today there are 2,469 different online Excel courses available on the popular learning platforms Udemy, LinkedIn, Coursera, and EdX. Plus a handful of hidden gems that aren’t listed on these platforms. We spent 80 hours comparing the top contenders to find the 6 best online Excel courses.

Here are our top picks for the best online Microsoft Excel courses:

Microsoft Excel is a powerful spreadsheet program that is widely used by businesses and individuals alike.

Learning Microsoft Excel can provide many benefits in the workplace and beyond.

Not only does it allow you to better organize and store data, but it also enables you to perform complex calculations quickly and easily with its powerful formula set.

Additionally, Microsoft Excel offers numerous tools for data analysis and an extensive array of free templates for quick formatting.

This software can also automate tasks with code, transform and clean data sets, create impressive visualizations with charts, generate reports effortlessly, improve analytical skills, and maximize data capabilities.

Furthermore, learning Microsoft Excel enhances your skills, making you more attractive in the job market.

Finally, taking online classes on Microsoft Excel allows anyone from beginners to experienced users to learn this valuable tool at their own pace.

With all these advantages in mind, it’s clear that learning Microsoft Excel benefits any individual or business looking to increase efficiency or refine their operations.

Let’s move forward to my top picks for Excel courses. The following is a comprehensive list of the best online Excel classes – a quick and straightforward guide for those who want to learn Excel ASAP.

You’ll learn Excel’s most useful features from the courses on my list. Excel menus, functions, formulas, visualization tools, VBA, and more. I collected the top classes for all experience levels – from beginners to advanced users.

Many great Excel instructors host their online courses independently. This means you won’t find them on the big learning platforms.

Like specialty stores, these independent Excel teachers might not get the massive traffic that big stores do, but they offer unique experiences and perspectives you won’t find elsewhere.

Here’s my pick of top independent Excel courses.

Instructor: Jon Acampora (Microsoft MVP)

Length: Annual Membership (you can keep learning for months, maybe years… there’s a massive amount of material included here)

Who it’s for: You are in a career that uses Excel heavily (finance, accounting, auditing, marketing, sales, HR, consulting, management), and you deal with data, systems, and reporting. You want to become the Excel expert in your office and learn from a community of like-minded people.

The Excel skills and results you get from this membership are top-class. And your investment in mastering Excel becomes more valuable as data analysis and reporting skills keep growing in importance.

Plus, Jon provides plug-and-play email templates to walk you through the most robust cases you can make to your manager to get reimbursed for this training.

Takeaway: Excel Campus Elevate Membership is a superb collection of 5 courses and membership of like-minded Excel Users. You will learn about Excel inside and out, including formulas, pivot tables, dashboards, Power Query, Power BI, and VBA macros. It’s ideal for beginners and intermediate users who want to become Excel masters fast.

Instructor: Mynda Treacy (Microsoft MVP)

Length: 9 hours of teaching videos (5hr 25min dashboard videos and 3hr 35min Excel videos)

Who it’s for: You are in a reporting role and want to automate the creation of Excel dashboards. Or you want to level up your Excel skills to get a data analysis or reporting job. Once you complete this course, you will be able to amaze most hiring managers with high-impact reports.

My Online Training Hub’s Excel Dashboards Course is my pick for the best Excel reporting course. If your current reports take days to update, you can learn how to cut hours from your task by using the techniques in this course.

The Excel skills and reporting principles you learn in this course are fantastic. And they’ll get more valuable as data skills rise in demand this century.

Takeaway: MOTH Excel Dashboards Course is an excellent investment if you need to learn data reporting and presentation skills. You need an intermediate level with Excel to get the most out of the course. I recommend this course if you are already in a reporting role or want to be hired as a data or business analyst.

Coursera is an online learning platform that offers self-paced content on a wide variety of subjects. The platform partners with top universities and companies, including Stanford, Yale, Google, and IBM.

Coursera has 6 tiers of online learning. You can choose to learn with short guided projects (1-2 hrs), courses (4-12 hrs), specializations (1-3 months), professional certificates (1-6 months), master-track university certificates (4-7 months), and even full university degrees (2-4 years).

Coursera lets anyone audit any course for free. “Auditing” means that you can watch the videos and read the readings, but you can’t interact with assessments other than in-video quiz questions. And you don’t get access to the sample files in Excel courses.

Specializations and Professional Certificates are $39-$99 USD a month. Paying this allows you to access all the material in the selected course(s).

If you want to learn more than one topic you can save money with a Coursera Plus subscription. This gives you unlimited access to 7,000+ courses, guided projects, specializations, and professional certificates for the all-inclusive price of $399 per year.

Microsoft Excel courses offer a wide range of benefits to users.

By taking an advanced course in Excel, you can learn how to best use the program for things like organizing and evaluating data, creating professional-level spreadsheets, and graphing functions.

These skills are essential for any business or individual who wants to make the most of their data.

Taking an Excel class can also help with time management by giving users the ability to store and organize large amounts of data quickly and efficiently.

Furthermore, these courses are easily accessible online, so anyone can take advantage of them without spending too much money or taking time out from their daily lives.

With all these advantages, it’s no wonder that taking a Microsoft Excel course is becoming increasingly popular!

Learning how to use Excel can take anywhere from a few hours to several months, depending on your skill level, the amount of time you can dedicate to the task, and how far you want to progress.

If you are starting out with Excel, it is recommended that you spend roughly 18-20 hours learning the basics.

It will take about 25-40 hours for most users to learn most of Excel’s key features, particularly if they want to master them.

It is important that you start with the basic knowledge of Excel and then build on it as your skills progress.

With dedication and practice, you should be able to gain a strong working knowledge of Excel in no time.

Udemy, Coursera, EdX, and LinkedIn are all popular online learning platforms.

However, they each have their own unique features that differentiate them from one another.

Udemy is an online marketplace for courses designed to teach specific skills. It offers a wide variety of courses created by experts in the field, and students can purchase individual classes or entire course packages at affordable prices.

Coursera is an academic-focused platform with a mix of accredited and non-accredited courses taught by top universities around the world. Its primary focus is on providing quality education with certificates available upon completion of certain programs.

EdX is another university-backed platform with a variety of free courses as well as some paid options for those looking for more comprehensive learning experiences.

LinkedIn Learning provides users with a library of professional development courses to help them advance their careers or acquire new skills relevant to their field or industry.

Each platform has its own advantages and disadvantages depending on what you’re looking for in terms of education quality and affordability, so it’s important to research which one best suits your needs before making any decisions about where to learn online.

Paying for Excel training can be one of the best investments you make in your career.

With Microsoft Excel being one of the most widely used spreadsheet applications, having a solid understanding of how to use it can provide you with an invaluable skill that will give you a competitive advantage in any field.

Learning the basics and more advanced techniques taught in Excel training courses can enable you to quickly analyze, organize and interpret data with ease.

This knowledge can be especially beneficial for business owners or those who are self-employed as it allows them to make better decisions based on hard data rather than guesswork.

Even if you don’t plan on using Excel regularly, having a basic understanding of its features is still worth investing in as it could give you a leg up when applying for jobs or promotions.

Ultimately, paying for Excel training is an investment that will pay off in the long run.

An entire online Microsoft Excel course can take anywhere from 2 hours to 4 months, depending on how much you want to develop your skills and how much time you can dedicate to learning.

Coursera’s award-winning online training “Excel Skills for Business Specialization” has 16.5 hours of videos plus several Excel projects.

Excel Macros & VBA School from Launch Excel has 10.5 hours of videos plus 40 Excel workbooks to hone your VBA automation skills.

Additionally, there are other courses that typically take about three to four weeks to learn the topics in Advanced Excel.

If you’re looking for a more comprehensive and detailed approach, there are a variety of courses available from beginner level to advanced level.

My favorite package is Jon Acampora’s Excel Elevate membership. This offers 5 different Excel courses in one subscription and includes a support community for you to get help with your Excel questions.

If you want to invest in an Excel course, the cost depends on the level of knowledge you seek.

Beginner courses can start at around $17 on Udemy, while intermediate-level and advanced-level courses can range from $99-$490.

Investing in an Excel course is beneficial as it will take your skillset to the next level, enabling you to produce better quality financial models and analysis.

In particular, when interviewing for internships or full-time jobs at investment banks or private equity firms, having knowledge of Excel for finance can help set you apart from other applicants.

Microsoft Excel certification is worth the effort and investment for those looking to expand their career opportunities.

With a Microsoft Office Specialist (MOS) certification, you can prove your expertise in creating and managing worksheets, working with cell ranges, and formatting data. This globally recognized credential is valued in many fields, such as accounting, finance, project management, marketing, technology etc.

Having certified Microsoft Excel skills on your resume will make you stand out from other candidates who merely list ‘proficient’ in the software on their resumes.

Not only does it give you a sense of satisfaction for completing the course but it also gives potential employers more confidence in your abilities.

Employers are increasingly looking for job applicants with advanced MS Excel skills so having this certification could be a great asset to any job seeker.

You can also get Excel certificates from the best Excel courses I listed above, and from platforms like LinkedIn Learning and Udemy.

No, Microsoft Excel is not hard to learn!

While it can be intimidating at first, breaking the learning process down into manageable components makes the task more achievable.

Beginners without prior experience in data or spreadsheets may find the application a bit challenging, but with dedication and patience they will quickly gain proficiency.

The time required to learn Excel depends on the depth of knowledge needed – mastering the basics is relatively straightforward, while more advanced skills take longer to acquire.

With its intuitive interface and useful features, Microsoft Excel can be an invaluable tool for businesses of all sizes.