Free online courseBusiness Applications in Microsoft Excel

Course Description

Turn spreadsheets into clear business answers with a practical, finance-focused approach to Microsoft Excel. This course is designed for anyone who wants to move beyond basic formulas and use Excel the way analysts and managers do: to summarize messy data, spot trends, test assumptions, and support real decisions with numbers. You will gain confidence working with common business scenarios and learn techniques that translate directly to productivity on the job.

You will start by learning how to organize and explore large datasets efficiently using pivot tables. Instead of manually counting transactions or sorting rows repeatedly, you will be able to create dynamic summaries that reveal patterns across customer types, products, or time periods. This skill is especially valuable when you need quick insights, flexible reporting, and repeatable analysis that can be updated as new data arrives.

From there, you will use Excel to look forward, not just backward. By applying forecasting and regression analysis, you will learn how historical information can support better estimates and planning. You will work with tools that help model relationships between variables, evaluate how well a trend fits the data, and generate forecasts that you can explain to stakeholders rather than simply accept.

The course also strengthens your financial decision-making skills by showing how to evaluate projects and investments in Excel. You will compute net present value and understand why the timing of the initial cash outflow is treated differently than later cash flows. With this foundation, you will see how small assumption changes can significantly alter conclusions and how to build models that are easier to audit and defend.

To handle real-world constraints, you will explore optimization with Solver, learning how to choose among competing projects when capital is limited. You will also calculate internal rates of return, including scenarios with irregular cash flows, and use goal seek to reverse engineer a company’s share price assumptions. Finally, you will connect these skills to dividend-based valuation thinking, building intuition for how markets price stable, dividend-paying businesses.

By the end, you will be able to build cleaner analyses, communicate results with confidence, and use Excel as a toolkit for business applications across reporting, forecasting, and valuation.