Start here if you are new to Excel, or if you use it every day but learned it by trial and error. Eighteen short lessons take you from the blank screen to building a proper monthly sales report with formulas, lookups, charts and a pivot table.
Every lesson has a free practice workbook with automatic ✓ checks, so you know straight away whether you got it right. Examples use Indian data: rupees, GST, lakhs and Indian names and cities.
How to use it: one lesson a day, in order. Read, try the examples in Excel, then do the practice file before moving on. About 30–45 minutes each.
- 1Excel Lesson 1: The Excel Screen and Moving Around FastYour first Excel lesson: workbooks, sheets, rows, columns and cells, the ribbon, Name Box and formula bar, and the keyboard shortcuts that…
- 2Excel Lesson 2: Entering Data, AutoFill and Flash FillEnter numbers, text and dates correctly, fill series with the fill handle, use Ctrl+Enter and Ctrl+D, and let Flash Fill split and…
- 3Excel Lesson 3: Formatting Cells So Reports Read WellNumber, currency, percentage and date formats, custom formats like 000 and lakhs, alignment and wrap text, borders, Format Painter, cell styles —…
- 4Excel Lesson 4: Your First Formulas and Cell ReferencesWrite formulas that start with =, use + - * / and ^, follow the order of operations, refer to cells instead…
- 5Excel Lesson 5: SUM, AVERAGE, COUNT, MIN and MAXThe five functions you will use every day: SUM, AVERAGE, COUNT/COUNTA/COUNTBLANK, MIN and MAX, plus AutoSum, LARGE/SMALL, how blanks and text are…
- 6Excel Lesson 6: IF — Making Decisions in a CellLearn IF step by step: comparison operators, returning text or numbers, AND and OR for combined rules, nested IF for grades and…
- 7Excel Lesson 7: Sorting and Filtering DataSort by one or several columns, sort by date or a custom order, filter by values, numbers, dates, text and colour, read…
- 8Excel Lesson 8: Excel Tables (Ctrl+T) for Every ListTurn any list into an Excel Table with Ctrl+T: banded rows, filters, automatic expansion, calculated columns, the Total Row, slicers, and formulas…
- 9Excel Lesson 9: Your First ChartsPick the right chart for the job, build column, line, pie and combo charts in seconds, add titles and data labels, change…
- 10Excel Lesson 10: Printing and Page SetupPrint Excel sheets that fit: Print Preview, orientation, Fit to page width, print area, repeating header rows, headers and footers with page…
- 11Excel Lesson 11: Absolute vs Relative References ($)Why formulas break when copied, and how the $ sign fixes it: relative, absolute ($B$8) and mixed ($A2, B$1) references, the F4…
- 12Excel Lesson 12: Text Functions — LEFT, RIGHT, MID, TRIM, PROPER and MoreClean and split messy text: TRIM extra spaces, fix case with PROPER/UPPER/LOWER, cut pieces with LEFT, RIGHT and MID, find positions with…
- 13Excel Lesson 13: Dates — TODAY, EOMONTH, DATEDIF and Date MathsHow Excel stores dates, adding days and months, due dates, month-end with EOMONTH, age and service with DATEDIF, working days with NETWORKDAYS,…
- 14Excel Lesson 14: Lookups — VLOOKUP and XLOOKUPFetch a price, name or rate from another table: VLOOKUP exact match step by step, XLOOKUP (easier and more flexible), handling codes…
- 15Excel Lesson 15: Data Validation and Drop-Down ListsStop typing mistakes before they happen: drop-down lists from a range or Table, whole-number and date limits, custom rules for PAN and…
- 16Excel Lesson 16: Conditional FormattingMake important cells stand out automatically: highlight rules, top/bottom, data bars, colour scales and icon sets, formula rules that colour whole rows,…
- 17Excel Lesson 17: Pivot Table BasicsSummarise thousands of rows in seconds: create a pivot table, drag fields into Rows, Columns, Values and Filters, change Sum to Count…
- 18Excel Lesson 18: Final Project — Build a Monthly Sales ReportPut the whole course together: turn raw orders into a one-page quarterly sales report with KPIs, region vs target with Met/Missed, a…
Finished? Continue with the full Excel function course, formula combinations and the Excel VBA course.