What is Microsoft Excel?

Data Analysis

Data analysis is important for an online business or website owner (eCommerce, blog, forums, etc.). It helps in tracking website visitors, product sell, customer reviews, marketing campaigns, user behaviour, and events. Microsoft Excel helps in filtering users data by country, filtering users by age, adding conditional formulas in big data, etc. smartly in excel.

Report Generation

Both online and offline companies and clients making it mandatory for the staff to maintain their daily progress reports. So they can easily create a table with Date, Time, Client, Task, Duration, and status according to clients or managers. Even companies can use it to track down daily progress reports.

Data upload/download through CSV

Many organisations keep valuable data in Excel and CSV files. Hence, by using MS Excel one can easily upload or download a file through CSV.

MS Excel is also known as a Workbook. A workbook has at least one Worksheet where you can store and calculate data. There can be many worksheets stored inside a workbook. Each worksheet can have a unique name.

Worksheets contain columns and rows. You can enter a large amount of text, or you can enter a date, number, or formula in a cell. Each cell can be formatted individually with distinct border, background colour, and font colour/size/type.

Excel isn’t complicated as it sounds. It is here to make your lives more comfortable in handling extensive data. There are plenty of shortcuts and tips that you can utilise whether you’re a total newbie or a professional expert.

Developing your MS Excel skills can be a great way to kick start your career. If you have plans to make a career as a data analyst or simply hone your excel skills, then these are the areas where you can improve.

Having a Microsoft Certification will boost open doors to many career opportunities. Microsoft has licensed Certiport to provide Excel certification. The two most recent tests (as of April 2019) are Excel 2016 and Excel 2016 Expert. This certification is recognised globally and gets better recognition and competitive edge over non-certified professionals.

The MS Excel course fee depends entirely on – experience of the trainer, duration of the course, level of the course – basic, intermediate and advanced level.

In a city like Mumbai, it will easily cost you between Rs. 3000 – 5000 per month and in Bangalore, it will cost in between Rs 3000 – 5500 per month.

Similarly, different cities will have different price ranges. To know more about the costs of MS Excel courses in your area, use our UrbanPro calculator.

Microsoft Excel is a vast course. If you are planning to learn excel, then many tutors provide online certification courses for basic to advance level. Choose the right course and get started with your excel training.

These are the best online MS Excel certification courses.

• MS Excel – Basic
• MS Excel – Advanced
• MS Excel – Pivot Tables
• MS Excel – Macros and VBA
• MS Excel – Dashboards
• MS Excel – Power Query
• MS Excel – Power Pivot
• MS Excel – Power BI

Keeping excel formula handy can be of great help, particularly while handling extensive data. It will help you complete your work faster and give relevant results at the same time.

Given below are some of the commonly used yet important Excel formulas that every excel user must know:

• INDEX MATCH – This function is the combination of two functions in Excel. Formula =INDEX(list of values, MATCH(what you want to lookup, lookup column, sorting identifier)
• IF with AND / OR – To test more than one condition with IF function. Formula – IF(OR(Logical1,Logical2),value_if_true,value_if_false)
• CHOOSE – Formula =CHOOSE(choice, option1, option2, option3). This function will help you to get a value from a list by specifying the position of that value.
• XNPV and XIRR – Formula : XNPV(discount rate, cash flows, dates). This function is used in discounting cash flows.
• SUMIF and COUNTIF – Formula: =SUMIF(range, criteria, [sum range]). This will return the sum of the values within a desired range of cells that all meet one criterion.
• PMT, PPMT, IPMT – Formula: PMT(interest rate, # of periods, present value). PMT is used to calculate the termly payment amount, including Interest Amount and Principal Amount excluding the Tax amount. PPMT – Use to calculate only the Principal Amount that you need to pay per term to the Bank. IPMT is used to calculate only the Interest Amount that you need to pay per term to the Bank.
• LEN and TRIM – The Len function is used to get how many characters a string has, and TRIM would remove all spaces except single space in between words. Formula: =LEN(text) and =TRIM(text)
• CONCATENATE – This function will help you to combine data into one cell. For example, you had a first and last name, given in cells A1 and B2 then you would type =CONCATENATE(A1,” “, B2) to get required data below.
• LEFT, MID and RIGHT functions – The LEFT function can return text from the beginning of a cell (left to right), MID returns the text from any start point of the cell (left to right), and RIGHT returns the text from the end of the cell (right to left).
• Max & Min – To find the minimum and maximum values in the rows. Example: =MAX(A1:A10) to get the maximum value and =MIN(A1:A9) to get the minimum amount.
• VLOOKUP – This function lets you find something in the leftmost column of a spreadsheet and return it as a value. Example =VLOOKUP(lookup value, the table being searched, index number, sorting identifier).