Functions, Data Analysis, Presentation and Finance w/ Excel (Udemy.com)

This course teaches Microsoft Excel, Power Pivot and Power BI. It starts from the beginning and goes all the way through to (and including) VBA. Excel is an extremely powerful tool, one which we will see can be used to understand, analyze, and present data. It can be used to build financial models, do data analysis via data science, and much more. It is an all-encompassing tool that blends analysis with presentation (using pivot tables and the data model). We will go through buttons, charts, data validation and conditional formatting, as well as all the regular functions. We cover every tool in Excel, starting from the basics, and review each many times. The general structure of the course includes many practice examples that allow a student to either follow along with a PDF or to follow along with a video. The concepts are put together to show full ideas, giving students the chance to integrate various different meta-analysis tools to build models and explore data.

It is based on a well-worn approach of practice, practice, and more practice. Each section has videos and written instructions to hone students' skills. The beginning of the course includes about twelve different "homework" sections, then the course goes on to a college level instruction, followed by two sections that give consolidated practice via "worksheets" and "a lesson a day" type structure. After this, various topic are discussed such as Monte Carlo as used in various pricing models, etc. There is particular focus on financial models since business applications are very important in Excel. There are also many sections that work through VBA - visual basic for applications to enhance the students understanding and develop further advanced methods.