Best Free Excel Resources & Tutorials

Many professionals are eager to learn Excel but hesitate because of the perceived up-front costs. Excel is currently available from Microsoft for $160 a year, or $6.99 per month when purchased as part of the Microsoft 365 suite. However, many free resources and tutorials are available to help you learn Excel.

This article will take a look at some of the most popular online Excel educational resources.

What is Excel?

Microsoft Excel is a spreadsheet program and tool for data analysis and management that business professionals commonly use. Part of the Microsoft 365 suite of applications, Excel is currently available on Mac and PC desktops, online via the Microsoft Office 365 cloud, and as a mobile application. Excel users can perform a variety of basic and advanced features and calculations on data in Excel. This app is often used for data calculations, automating tasks, and generating graphs, charts, or PivotTables based on data findings. Excel has applications in many industries, such as engineering, statistics, healthcare, and finance.

What Can You Do with Excel?

Excel has hundreds of features and tools that help users organize, manage, analyze, and visualize data. The following are just a few of the tools and features that make Excel the go-to for professionals around the globe:

• In Excel, users can add or average numbers in cells, locate high, median, or low values, count cells containing numbers, and find a product by multiplying cells. It’s also possible to delete extra white space and truncate numbers by removing fractions.
• Excel can learn your patterns the more you use it so that it can organize your data and ultimately save time.
• Users can share workbooks with others in real-time to ensure that all collaborators have the most up-to-date version.
• It’s possible to work on Excel files from the web and mobile and desktop devices.
• Users can now add data right into Excel from a photo. The Excel app enables users to take a picture of printed data with their iPhone or Android, then convert this image into an editable Excel table. This helpful trick helps users avoid manually entering hard copy data and is made possible through Excel’s image recognition capabilities.
• Financial transactions can be imported into Excel so that users can organize and review their financial information and receive helpful insights toward making more informed financial decisions.
• Excel’s PivotTables help users perform analysis and summaries of datasets, regrouping spreadsheet data for more effective comparisons. By seeing data from different perspectives, it’s possible to get a more comprehensive picture of revenue sources and other vital information.

Free Resources & Tutorials to Help You Learn Excel

The following are some of the best online tutorials and free resources to help Excel beginners learn more about this powerful spreadsheet application.

Noble Desktop

Noble Desktop, a New York State-Licensed technology training school located in Manhattan, has provided educational instruction for over thirty years in web development, data science, digital marketing, UX/UI design, Excel, and other topics. In addition to their in-person and live online courses, bootcamps, and certificates, Noble is also a rich resource for free seminars in Excel, among other topics. Noble’s Excel Blog includes an array of free tutorials and articles on industry-relevant Excel topics, like IF statements, PivotTables, macros, and data validation.

In addition, Noble Desktop’s free Excel classes online provide Excel beginners with video content about the top-ten Excel techniques that will save them time at work. This free webinar offers essential tricks that help to reduce the hours spent on unnecessary work tasks. Some of the topics covered in this course include:

• Inserting comments & links
• Navigating shortcuts
• Removing duplicates
• Splitting & joining text

Excel Exposure

Excel Exposure is a free resource for premium online Excel training. This site offers a variety of video courses and written tutorials to help Excel users at all skill levels learn more about this application. Almost 40 lessons are available, which are broken into beginner, intermediate, and advanced categories. Each lesson is less than 20 minutes long, which makes it possible for learners to study Excel amid other responsibilities. One of Excel Exposure’s best resources is its Master Workbook, which is situated within the Excel environment. This helps students apply the tools and skills they’ve learned in a lesson, such as conditional formatting, grouping and ungrouping columns and rows, as well as creating PivotTables and charts.

Contextures

Contextures is a platform that provides Excel learners with hundreds of sample files, videos, and tutorials. This site also has quick Excel tips, a newsletter, blog posts, and .zip files that can be downloaded to demonstrate how Excel functions work with real-world data examples. This robust resource also provides hundreds of spreadsheets that can be downloaded, then opened in Excel, each offering clear, step-by-step instructions on a specific topic, such as running functions, performing data validation, and adding filters to columns and rows.

Contextures also has new Excel-specific tutorials available as well, in topics like:

• FILTER function lookup
• EXACT function
• UserForm
• Status bar tips
• Show target range in a line chart

Microsoft Excel Video Training

Microsoft, the creator of Excel, also has a wide range of free video content available to help Excel novices learn the ins and outs of this application. Over a dozen short videos are available on topics such as:

• Formatting
• Share & coauthor
• Power Query
• Tables
• Linked data types

In addition to these practical, accessible videos, Microsoft also has written step-by-step instructions to guide Excel users through various processes. Templates are also available from Microsoft, such as a nutrition tracker, grocery list, student calendar, and credit card tracker.

Coursera

Coursera’s Excel Skills for Business: Essentials can be audited for free. The first part of this class covers the core components of Excel. Over the course of six weeks, students will learn how to navigate Excel’s interface, execute common calculations using functions and formulas, format spreadsheets, and visualize data using graphs and charts. Those who enroll in this class have the chance to apply their acquired Excel skills to solve various business problems. This class includes a downloadable Excel workbook containing examples, full datasets, and exercises with real-world applications. The course is very popular among Excel learners; half a million have already completed it.

Udemy

Udemy’s Useful Excel for Beginners is a popular beginner-level Excel course. This free class contains nearly ten hours of content and covers a variety of core Excel concepts, tools, and skills. Because of the length of this course, it covers a range of pertinent Excel topics. This class has been completed by more than 275,000 students and is a great resource for Excel novices who are looking to learn the fundamentals.

FreeCodeCamp

FreeCodeCamp’s Microsoft Excel Tutorial for Beginners is another beginner-friendly resource for those looking to learn Excel online. This free 2.5-hour class covers many Excel basics. Students learn by completing several real-world projects. Some of the topics covered in this course include:

• Entering data
• Navigating the Excel interface
• Creating formulas, graphs, and charts
• Implementing VLOOKUP
• Importing & exporting data
• Understanding relative & absolute reference

GoSkills & HubSpot Academy

A free Excel for Marketers course is available through GoSkills & HubSpot Academy. While this course has universal Excel content about common shortcuts, formulas, and functions, it’s especially useful for those who work in marketing. Marketers often have to use more than one system for data management, such as Google Analytics and a CRM. It can be difficult to analyze data that comes from different systems. However, with the help of Excel, this process can be streamlined. This course teaches students how to import data into Excel, then work with this application’s tables, functions, and other features.

Excel Easy

Excel Easy is a comprehensive, user-friendly platform that guides learners through the Excel learning process chapter by chapter. Each chapter incorporates screenshots and notes so that those new to Excel can cover this app's fundamental tools and features with visual and written components. In addition, there are 300 examples available at the conclusion of a tutorial demonstrating how to execute the skills learned in real-world scenarios.

Some of the topics covered on Excel Easy are:

• Creating tables
• Working with multiple worksheets
• Formatting cells
• Creating a ribbon

Key Insights

• Microsoft Excel is a spreadsheet application for data management and analysis that business professionals around the world use.
• For those new to Excel or looking to gain an overview of this application’s features, online resources and tutorials are a great option. Many of them are free and provide useful tips on working with the Excel interface and performing basic calculations and visualizations.
• Free resources and tutorials are offered by top educational providers, such as Noble Desktop, Udemy, Coursera, and ExcelEasy.

Learn Excel with Hands-on Training at Noble Desktop

Are you looking to learn how to use Microsoft Excel, the industry-standard spreadsheet application? If so, Noble Desktop currently offers a variety of Excel courses in NYC and live online. Classes are available for those new to Excel and for learners who regularly work with this spreadsheet application and wish to improve their skills. In addition, in-person and live online Excel courses are available through Noble Desktop or one of its affiliate schools. A variety of course options are offered, ranging in duration from three hours to two days and costing between $229 and $1,099.

Noble Desktop’s Excel Bootcamp provides an excellent option for those who want to master core Excel concepts, such as working with PivotTables and What-If Analysis. Students who enroll in this rigorous, 21-hour course can elect to study in person in Manhattan or learn in the live online environment. This small class comes with the option of a free retake and covers a variety of Excel concepts applicable to the business world.