Excel training for postgrad research?

[GenieGenealogy]

Have just completed a MSc and toying with the idea of a PhD. Humanities subject. During my MSc my lack of Excel skills were really evident but didn't have too much of an impact as the number of unique records I was looking at was fairly low. A similar PhD will involve looking at a lot more and I think it would be a good idea to get some Excel training - I can add columns, produce charts etc but struggle enormously with formulas and things like pivot tables are a complete mystery.

My potential supervisor has also mentioned MS Access (which I thought wasn't really a thing any more) or something called AirTable which appears to be a cross between the two.

So can anyone recommend free/minimal cost Excel training for this sort of academic use rather than for accounting/finance? I am not sure what the uni offers, if anything.

Udemy is great for coding courses, a quick search found a good value one for excel https://www.udemy.com/course/microsoft-excel-2013-from-beginner-to-advanced-and-beyond/

Have you looked at any of the free training from Microsoft?

https://support.microsoft.com/en-au/office/excel-video-training-9bc05390-e94c-46af-a5b3-d7c22f6990bb

I haven’t really started looking at anything. Will do some research

You can learn just about anything about excel online. There are some really good tutorials and explanations.

If your uni is signed up to LinkedIn learning they have some great Excel and PowerBi courses

I'd save your money and look at YouTube.

There are thousands of tutorials available - especially in respect of sorting/filtering/processing and analysis of large data volumes.

Pivot tables are brilliant and pretty easy to get a grip of.

I'd also look at how to remove duplicates.

Microsoft Access - I honestly wouldn't bother.

I'm very good at both and frankly with hardly any exceptions have not found anything I can't do on Excel re:data.

Access (a database) is far more complex and unlike Excel allows you to create "easy" forms and reports for other people to access (hence the name) data.

You don't really need this if it's just the data and you,

Thank you all. My prospective supervisor seemed to think Excel was OK, but that its limitations may not be immediately obvious depending what sort of data I generate and what I want to do with it - apparently this is "all part of the process".

The queen of Excel is Leila Gharani - https://www.youtube.com/@LeilaGharani closely followed by the also excellent Mynda Treacy https://www.youtube.com/@MyOnlineTrainingHub

You can pick up absolutely loads from their free vids, and Leila's courses are often available at very reasonable rates on Udemy. Under-rated but incredibly useful features of Excel include (not pivot tables although of course they are v useful too) and - this particularly is amazing. There's also Power Pivot, which allows you to build a more database-like structure into your data.

For larger scale data analysis you are likely to need to go beyond Excel. DS and I have just been looking at Datacamp after I had a meeting earlier in the week with a uni researcher who mentioned R and python were the two languages her analysts used. DS is thinking about doing the Introduction to R when he's done more of the Excel course on Udemy. Not free but I bet you can find 'the Leila of R' on YouTube.

Argh I've done my usual and forgotten that if you link to a YouTube video with friendly text MN eats the friendly text in order to display the thumbnail. The first incredibly useful feature of Excel is tables (this is different from pivot tables although actually it's like a pivot table without the pivot) and Power Query.