Please share your best MS Excel Tips/Best place to learn for free online?

[BretonStripe]

I'm looking to upskill my very basic MS Excel knowledge and skills. I'd like to learn how to do pivot tables and write macros, but don't want to commit to, or pay for, a proper course.

I've Googled a few times but the Internet is awash with so many different videos and tutorials by so many people, I'm not sure who to trust.

Can anyone here help please ? Any particular YouTube accounts you'd recommend? Thanks in advance!

Most of what I've learnt in Excel - pivots, macros, arrays, nested formulas - has come from putting what I want to do into Google, rather than any courses.

Exceljet is a really good site for me, it's logical and clear.
I can put something really obscure into Google (eg "lookup to multiple columns, include blanks, not an array") and there is always a result from Exceljet that fits the bill AND is easy to understand.

The reason why courses cost money is that doing it for free is faffy and time-consuming and confusing and you don't know if something is going to be worthwhile till you've sat through the adverts at the start of the video. Paying the money works.

Microsoft Learn website has lots of modules

The easiest thing is to have a whole load of data and then give stuff a try tbh.

Do you work?

Oh thank you! Not heard of Exceljet so will give it a try.

Thank you - will certainly take a look.

Hello. Yes, I do, part-time in an office. My role is changing from next week and I'll need to look at different data, such as monthly reports from an e-learning platform and GoogleDocs surveys. I know I can download xls / GoogleSheets, but I'd like to be able to do a pivot table to see clear visual changes. I've heard macros are good for regular spreadsheet data formatting.

Also, I need to create spreadsheets to do with KPI's and health & safety reporting, so would like to do conditional formatting for ease.

Our chambers of office offer fairly affordable courses, would your company not pay?

I would just have the data and teach myself from Google and giving it a go. That’s what I did back in the day tbh.

Practice practice practice. I go for months not using excel then have to do really random things - ChatGPT is great for tips and tricks. I also keep my own spreadsheet for incomings and outgoings and will often do things like refer back to previous years to work out how much debt I’ve paid or what I owe using comparison tools and sums.

Would work fund a subscription? LinkedIn learning has a huge array of courses which are all covered by the subscription. You can dip in and out of courses, and they are normally broken down into parts, so you don't necessarily have to complete the whole thing.

Also if you start a course and realise it's not quite what you were after you can just pick a different one.

Co-pilot is free and useful for helping to write formulas or for instructions on how to carry out a function in Excel