Course: Excel 365 for Business Analysis

Microsoft Excel has many potential applications, offering extensive, customizable features to suit virtually all tasks and workflows. At first, Excel can be intimidating, but the benefits of knowing how to eke out every bit of this tool's productivity far outweigh the slight learning curve. In this course, you'll learn how to set up Excel, identify and choose an Excel template, locate and recognize the purpose of each primary menu item group in the Quick Access Toolbar, and apply customization to this toolbar. Next, you'll execute basic cell operations, such as copy-pasting data and inserting and deleting rows and columns. You'll and apply a range of cell formatting options, such as alignment, font, and currency formats. Finally, you'll import delimited and fixed-width data and work with Excel's Flash Fill functionality.

One of the primary purposes of using Excel is to analyze and present data in a focused, accessible, and accurate way. A great way to do this is with charts and sparklines. In this course, you'll create basic chart types, such as line, bar, and pie charts, as well as more advanced charts, like treemaps and sunburst charts. In doing this, you'll work with the different aspects of Excel's chart customization capabilities, from chart element transparency to the orientation and exploding out of slices in a pie chart. Next, you'll advance to use more statistically-oriented chart types, including histograms, scatter plots, and box-and-whisker plots. Finally, you'll learn to create, customize, and work with Excel's sparklines, which are lightweight visualizations usually contained within a single cell.

Conditional formatting is a significant and powerful feature in Excel. In this course, you'll begin by using some of the more straightforward types of conditional formattings, such as those based on specific values or ranking. You'll then use the more visually appealing types of conditional formatting, such as data bars, icon sets, and color scales, before advancing to more complex custom formatting rules using worksheet functions and a cell's row and column information.

Additionally, you'll distinguish the purpose of notes versus comments and how to work with them both. Finally, you'll learn to use built-in styles and themes, create custom styles and themes and export them for use in other Office 365 products, such as PowerPoint, to apply a uniform look-and-feel to all your spreadsheets and presentations.

Some of the core benefits of working with data in Excel include connecting data combined from different workbooks and controlling how it's presented and who has access to it. In this course, you'll begin by linking data in different Excel workbooks, before editing, testing, and cleanly breaking those links.

Next, you'll work with an often-ignored but powerful aspect of Excel - precise control over how a workbook is laid out and printed. You'll configure headers, footers, page numbers, background, images, and the views used to print only parts of a workbook.

Finally, you'll use Excel's protection features for individual cells and cell ranges, worksheets, and workbooks. This includes setting roles and passwords, working with read-only workbooks, and utilizing editable cell ranges.

Excel is not only used for aggregating and analyzing data, but also for data cleansing. There are several data cleaning, validation, and checking techniques available, some of which are among Excel's most well-known and widely-used functions.

In this course, you'll start by using various string and data manipulation functions to clean data and fill in missing values.

Next, you'll perform simple data validation based on specific numeric thresholds and text lengths, before moving on to validation using lists. You'll then combine data validation to implement a formidable, dynamic data validation mechanism using named ranges and the INDIRECT formula.

Finally, you'll use one-dimensional lookups - the classic HLOOKUP and VLOOKUP worksheet functions - as well as more complex, two-dimensional lookups utilizing a combination of INDEX and MATCH.

Excel's Scenario Manager allows you to create named scenarios with different values for key variables. These scenarios can be quickly examined and summarized using the What-If Analysis tool. In this course, you'll use GoalSeek and Solver, both of which are mathematical tools. Goal Seek comes in handy when solving quadratic, cubic, or other equations. Solver is much more powerful and allows complex constrained optimization problems to be easily defined and addressed. As you'll recognize, Solver's interface, used for specifying objective functions and constraints, is intuitive and easy to use. Next, you'll use several heavy-duty statistical techniques in Analysis ToolPak. These range from the creation of correlation and covariance matrices, hypothesis testing, and F-test and T-test interpretations to ANOVA, random and periodic sampling, and the construction and analysis of linear regression models.

In this course, you'll recognize how relational data - data with schema and clearly-defined column names - can be imported into Excel as a set of data tables. This data can be sliced-and-diced using classic Excel pivot tables or the more robust PowerPivot add-in. Now a standard part of Excel, this add-in vastly expands the tool's capabilities with some serious entity-relationship modeling and big data analysis. Excel has powerful capabilities to detect relationships across models and infer foreign key relationships between parent and child tables. Creating, visualizing, and modeling such relationships is an important aspect of working with relational databases. As you'll recognize, you can now accomplish much of that from within Excel using PowerPivot. In this course, you'll use some classic yet powerful worksheet functions that have ensured Excel's use in Wall Street for decades. These functions can be used to compute the yield of a bond and the present and future values of a set of cash flows. They can also be used to perform complex operations on settlement dates and compounding rates of financial instruments.

Perform Business Analyst tasks in Microsoft Excel such as managing cells, importing and exporting data, inserting and customizing charts, and performing exploratory data analysis. You will then perform aggregate operations and one dimensional lookups, clean and validate data, utilize the What-if feature in Excel, and implement ANOVA and perform linear regression.

This lab provides access to tools typically used by Business Analysts, including:

- Microsoft Excel 2016
- Power BI Desktop
- Tableau Desktop
- MariaDB
- Anaconda

Final Exam: Business Analyst will test your knowledge and application of the topics presented throughout the Business Analyst track of the Skillsoft Aspire Business Analyst to Data Analyst Journey.