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Learn Advanced Excel in 3 Months
Roadmap with Resources
-
Chandoo
Who is this roadmap for?
This roadmap is for anyone interested in learning Advanced Excel Skills for Data Analysis or Reporting work. Follow this roadmap if you:
- Want to learn "Advanced Excel"
- Can allocate 4-8 hours every week for 12 weeks
- Have basic understanding of Excel
- Are motivated and driven
Month # 1
Focus on getting & cleaning data
This month focus on how to get, clean & manage data within Excel. The key learning objectives will be how to use Power Query, Tables, Data management features and how to perform simple "Exploratory Data Analysis" with Excel.
Technical Skills
- How to get in and use Excel?
- How to use Excel tables?
- How to use Power Query to load and clean data?
- Working with Flashfill, text to columns and other clean-up functions in Excel (video)
- How to filter & sort data in Excel?
- Doing simple descriptive analysis of data with in Excel
- How to use Excel References (video)
Course
If you need step-by-step course with clear examples, sample files and downloadable materials to teach you advanced Excel & dashboard reporting, please check out my Excel School program.
This comprehensive online class will teach you everything mentioned in this roadmap + more.
Domain Skills
In Month 1, learn about your industry / domain by:
- Talking to your friends who work in the same domain
- Visiting company websites and understanding their business model and nature of work.
- Read books on Statistics and data analysis.
Project
In Month 1, You can do a simple project to implement all the skills you have learned.
- Build an Expense Tracker in Excel that loads data from your bank statements (in PDF or CSV or Excel formats), cleans the data and tells you where your money is going.
- Run a survey about anything on your friends and analyze the data. Use tools like Microsoft Forms or Google Forms to automate the data collection and Power Query to consolidate the data.
- Download any sports / movies or other favorite topic data and cleanse & analyze it. See if you can find anything odd in the data. Use websites like kaggle to get the data.
Month # 2
Focus on analyzing the data
This month learn how to analyze the data by asking right questions, using formulas + pivot tables to answer them. Learn how to highlight important points and information with conditional formatting and how to make interactive analysis with slicers & data validation.
Technical Skills
- Formulas:
- Pivot tables:
- Concepts:
Domain Skills
In Month 2, learn about your industry / domain by:
- Studying necessary statistical and functional areas of your work.
- Talk to your friends in the industry. Take them out to coffee and ask them what they do, what kind of analysis they often do and how they do it?
- Find volunteer / freelance / extra work opportunities to practice what you are learning.
- Next time you meet your friends, discuss / analyze your favorite sports team / tv show / politics / weather / video game.
- Read books or watch videos about your domain.
Project
In Month 2, You can do a simple project to implement all the skills you have learned.
- Sales Report from awesome chocolates dataset. Use this dataset and generate a sales report to show how an individual salesperson has done in 2021. Show their sales & boxes by product. Make it interactive so we can select another person easily. Build this with formulas alone and then with Pivot + formulas.
- Build a financial goal tracker. You can input any number of goals and their cost (in today’s terms) and the tracker tells you how much you should save to have the money in future (with inflation, various return rates).
Month # 3
Focus on presenting the data
This month build skills to present your data. Understand how various charts work, how to create and customize them, how to make them interactive and how to lay them out. Learn when to "not" use charts. Build verbal and written communication skills to share your insights with others.
Technical Skills
- Charting:
- Dashboards
- Concepts:
Domain Skills
In Month 3, learn about your industry / domain by:
- Thinking about how the technical concepts relate to domain concepts you are learning.
- Imagine work scenarios and see what tech, domain skills are needed to solve them. (For ex, you want to know why shipments are delayed in first quarter of the year, what domain knowledge is needed and what tech skills are needed to figure the reason?)
- Think about the human side of analysis. How people read & consume information etc.
- Learn more about your area of work and what will make you successful.
Project
In Month 3, here are a few projects you can try:
- Build a one page dashboard for Awesome Chocolate CEO with Excel Use this dataset
- Build a system to automate data collection, clean-up, analysis and visualization for your industry
- Make Expense Tracker 2.0 that can read a folder of monthly debit & credit files, show where the money is coming from and where it goes, spot trends and does forecasting.
All 3 Months
in One Course
Introducing Excel School
Learn all the Advanced Excel Skills in one place with my Excel School Program. Rated 5 stars ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ by more than 10,000 students, this course will give you everything you need to be successful in workplace.
Got Questions?
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Got a question about this roadmap or have suggestions? Please share your thoughts in the comments section below.
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2 Responses to “Learn Advanced Excel – 3 Month Roadmap with Resources”
Hey chandoo,
Im hungry to learn Power Bi advance excel with VBA and SQL as well. how I can learn with in 2 months. Because my company Kick on my ass.. so, Now I'm available to learn... 24/7.
I have basic knowledge about the Excel. But this is not much.. to became a analyst.
Waiting for your reply..
Thanks buddy for making all the videos i m damm fan of yours...
Chandoo, all teachings I have seen in your you tube presentations are awsome!. I have a lack of skills in excel for summarizing data for awsome presentations as you have done. One aspect I have not encountered in all you videos is about how to use excel for warehousing data. Please point me, I if I have missed it in your video collection, otherwise please let me know where I can find this type of skill. Meantime I will keep watching your awsome teachings to become better skilful man in excel, cheers!