Best Excel Courses
From beginner to advanced
Most Popular Excel Courses
This guide provides an overview of the most popular and best Excel courses for finance professionals working towards completing CFI’s online program. Excel is one of the most important tools for any financial analyst, and having great spreadsheet skills can make the difference between moving up the ladder or not.
List of Best Excel Courses
Below is a list of the top spreadsheet courses offered by CFI, from beginner to advanced.
#1 Excel Crash Course
Level: Beginner
This free course covers the basics and critical information for any financial analyst. The class is suitable for professionals at any level of an organization, whether entry-level or an executive who wants to refresh their skills. The crash course is always one of CFI’s most popular and best Excel courses.
Key learning objectives:
- Layout, navigation, and the ribbon
- Settings and how to customize them
- Formatting – backgrounds, fonts, numbers, borders, shading
- Formulas – anchoring, naming cells, auditing, tracing precedents
- Functions – sum, average, sumproduct, min, max, small, large
#2 Financial Modeling Fundamentals
Level: Beginner
This course is designed to teach the Excel skills required to learn financial modeling and financial analysis. The class builds on the Excel Crash Course (above) and gets students even more confident about working in spreadsheets.
Key learning objectives:
- Moving around a worksheet quickly
- F5, fill right, fill down, and how to rapidly build an analysis
- Better formulas – using names, breaking down financial formulas, VLOOKUP, IF statements
- Catering for uncertainty – data tables, goal seek, scenario planning, solver
- Auditing a model – model integrity, structure, go to special, tracing precedents and dependents
#3 Scenario & Sensitivity Analysis
Level: Intermediate
The class is a core requirement of the FMVA designation and shows students how to use formulas and functions to create dynamic scenarios and sensitivity analysis in a spreadsheet. It assumes that students have completed either of the two beginner courses listed above. This is one of CFI’s more modeling-focused and best Excel courses.
Key learning objectives:
- How to design scenarios in a model
- Using the choose function to pick a live case in the model
- Setting up direct sensitivity analysis and data tables
- Building indirect sensitivity analysis and data tables
- Using formulas to sort results automatically
- Creating a tornado chart and other outputs
#4 Excel Dashboards
Level: Intermediate
This set of tutorials focuses on how to create beautiful and insightful outputs from an Excel model. The first part focuses on design principles and data visualization, while the second half focuses on how to build a dashboard, step-by-step.
Key learning objectives:
- Learn who your audience is and how to tailor your message
- Visuals – text, tables, line chart, bar chart, scatter plot, waterfall, tornado, gauge, and other charts/graphs
- How to focus attention and tell a story
- Learn about the importance of key performance indicators (KPIs), dashboards, and how to design them
- Build the dashboard in Excel step by step
#5 Advanced Excel Formulas
Level: Advanced
This is one of CFI’s more advanced Excel courses and teaches participants how to use interesting combinations of functions to build dynamic and advanced formulas.
Key learning objectives:
- Dynamic dates with IF statements
- Dynamic totals and averages with IF and OFFSET
- Scenarios with the choose function
- XNPV and XIRR functions
- INDEX and MATCH functions
- Cell and MID functions
- Extracting data from cells
- Nested IF statements
- Pivot tables
- Advanced charts
- Dynamic time period charts
#6 Excel Modeling with VBA
Level: Advanced
Learn VBA. This advanced Excel course teaches students how to use Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) to create more powerful and automated Excel models.
Key learning objectives:
- How to use the Visual Basic editor
- Relative and absolute referencing
- How to import a text file with a macro
- Creating sub-procedures
- Object hierarchies
- How to declare variables
- Designing custom functions and formulas
- How to perform branching, looping, and procedure code
More Excel Courses & Tutorials
If you want even more Excel tutorials or are looking for free content, YouTube can be a great place to find helpful tutorials. CFI’s YouTube channel has hundreds of videos, and so do other authors such as Excel Campus and ExcelIsFun.
Below is CFI’s Crash Course on YouTube for you to start learning right now!
Additional Resources
Thank you for reading CFI’s guide and overview of the best Excel courses and tutorials to take your spreadsheet skills to the next level! CFI is the official provider of the Financial Modeling & Valuation Analyst (FMVA)™ certification, designed to transform anyone into a world-class analyst.
To continue learning and developing, check out these additional CFI resources:
