Ten practical guides
Excel for Practical Analysis
Start with the job you need the spreadsheet to do. These guides use small business examples and show the checks that keep a workbook understandable after it grows.
Excel has a large official training and support ecosystem and remains a common tool for reporting, operations, analysis, and planning across roles.
Excel basics
Learn the Excel basics people use at work: clean tables, cell references, sorting, filtering, and a repeatable way to check your spreadsheet.
Formulas and functions
A practical guide to SUMIFS, COUNTIFS, IF, IFERROR, text functions, and date functions, with examples that show how the pieces fit together.
XLOOKUP vs. INDEX-MATCH
Compare XLOOKUP with INDEX-MATCH using exact-match examples, left lookups, missing values, and compatibility tradeoffs.
PivotTables
Turn transaction rows into a useful PivotTable, choose the right fields, group dates, show percentages, and avoid misleading totals.
Data cleaning
A safe Excel data-cleaning workflow for duplicates, spaces, inconsistent labels, dates, numbers stored as text, and missing values.
Conditional formatting
Use Excel conditional formatting to flag overdue work, compare against targets, and reveal patterns without turning a report into a wall of color.
Charts for KPIs
Pick an Excel chart based on the comparison you need, then use targets, labels, and scales without distorting the result.
Goal Seek and Solver
Learn when to use Goal Seek, Data Tables, or Solver in Excel, with a break-even example and checks that keep the model honest.
Dashboard design
Plan an Excel dashboard around decisions, define KPIs, separate data from presentation, and design filters and charts that stay reliable.
Power Query basics
Use Power Query to import, clean, combine, and refresh recurring files without repeating the same manual spreadsheet steps each month.