Essential Excel for Business Analysts and Consultants

What is the aim of this course?  

Excel is the most often used first-choice tool of every business analyst and consultant. Maybe it is not the most fancy or sophisticated one,  yet it is universally understood by everybody especially your boss and your customers.  

Excel is still pretty advanced tool with countless number of features and functions. I have mastered quite a lot of them during my studies and while working. After some time in consulting I discovered that most of them are not that useful; some of them bring more problems than solutions. On top of that there are features that we are taught at university that are not flexible and pretty time consuming.  While working as a business analyst I developed my own set of tricks to deal with Excel  I learned how to make my analyses idiot-proven and extremely universal.  

I will NOT teach you the entire Excel as it is simply not efficient (and frankly you don’t need it). This course is organized around 80/20 rule and I want to teach you the most useful (from business analyst / consultant perspective) formulas as fast as possible. I want you also to acquire thanks to the course good habits in Excel that will save you loads of time.  

If done properly, this course will transform you in 1 day into pretty good business analyst that knows how to use Excel in the smart way. It is based on my 12 years of experience as a consultant in top consulting companies and as a Board Member responsible for strategy, improvement and turn-arounds in biggest companies from FMCG, SMG, B2B sector that I worked for.  On the basis of what you will find in this course I have trained over 100 business analysts who now are Investment Directors, Senior Analyst, Directors in Consulting Companies, Board Members etc.  

I teach step by step on the basis of Excel files that will be attached to the course. To make the best out of the course you should follow my steps and repeat what I do with the data after every lecture. Don’t move to the next lecture if you have not done what I show in the lecture that you have gone through.  

 I assume that you know basic Excel so the basic features (i.e. how to write formula in Excel) are not explained in this course. I concentrate on intermediate and advanced solutions and purposefully get rid of some things that are advanced yet later become very inflexible and useless (i.e. naming the variables). At the end, I will show 4 full blown analyses in Excel that use the tricks that I show in the lectures.  

To every lecture you will find attached  (in additional resources) the Excel shown in the Lecture so as a part of this course you will also get a library of ready-made analyses that can, with certain modification, be applied by you in your work.  

Why I decided to create this course?  

I have done number of courses showing you how to analyze data in Excel. Yet, I have noticed that some students lack the fluency of operations in Excel. This course is designed to fill in the gap and help you fully appreciate my other courses for business analysts and consultants. It can be used also as standalone course that will help you to be smart in Excel  

In what way will you benefit from this course?  

The course is a practical, step by step guide loaded with tones of analyses, tricks, hints that will significantly improve the speed with which you do the analyses as well as the quality of the conclusions coming out of available in your company data. There is little theory – mainly examples, a lot of tips from my own experience as well as other notable examples worth mentioning. Our intention is that thanks to the course you will know:  

1. How to use Excel in a smart way to be able to analyses data fast and efficiently

2. How to draw conclusions from analyses – chosen examples of analyses

3. How to be efficient in your work as analyst?

4. How to build Excels that it is understandable for you and your team, even after some time

You can also ask me any question either through the discussion mode or by messaging me directly.  

How the course is organized?  

The course is divided currently in 6 sections and will be adding new section to address other important issues. Currently you will find the following sections:  

• Introduction. We begin with little intro into the course  

• How to merge data from different sources. Quite often as an analyst you will have to combine data from different sources. In this section I will show you how to do it using VLOOKUP function and others to make sure that you can easily combine data from different tables into the desired analysis   

• Cleaning and unifying data.  50% of your time will be lost on setting the data right so it can be used for analyses. In this section you will      learn how to clean and unify data fast   

• How to use IF function and what you can do instead? Most of analyses require you to make them dependable on something. For this you can use IF function which gets messy with more complicated formulas. I will show you how to avoid the mess and in most cases not use IF function   

• Pivot Tables. As a business analyst you will have to look at data on different levels. I will show you how to do it with Pivot Tables, Pivot Charts and what to do instead.   

• Other useful functions. In this section I will show you other useful function that you should master   

• Example of analysis. Here we show full analysis from start to end including drawing conclusions. This will show you want should be the end result   

• Tools for analyzing data. On top of Excel function you have available other tools in Excel that we will discuss in section. Most of them save you a lot of trouble in analyzing data   

• Being faster with Excel. If you spend 6-8 hours a day with Excel you have to be fast not to waste your valuable time. Here I will show you  how to do it   

• Visual Basic – main things you should know. Sometimes it is much easier to do something in Visual Basic than go via typical Excel formulas. For some cases Visual Basics creates new opportunities. Here I will show you the most useful elements of Visual Basic.   

You will be able also to download many additional resources  

• Excels with analyses shown in the course

• Links to additional presentations and movies

• Links to books worth reading

At the end of my course, students will be able to…   

• You will master the most crucial functions and features of Excel

• Understand the main challenges in analyzing data in Excel

• Perform the analyses in a very effective manner

Who should take this course? Who should not?   

• Business analysts

• Researchers

• Controllers

• Consultants

• Small and medium business owners

• Startups founders

What will students need to know or do before starting this course?   

• Basic Excel

• Basic knowledge of economics or finance