COACHED TRAINING: Excel Fundamentals Boot Camp
Course Description
In the Fundamentals Boot Camp, you will begin with a review core skills for the Excel analyst. This section is geared to teach critical skills to less experienced users and review those skills for intermediate users. We’ll start with basic formulas, reviewing absolute and relative referencing, and move into a review of Math, Logic, Text and Date functions. From there, we’ll look at how data SHOULD be structured in Excel for advanced analytics, then dive deep into Excel’s most feared function: VLOOKUP. (Yes, we are very aware that XLOOKUP exists today, but trust us – if you can master VLOOKUP, you can master ANY Excel formula!) Finally, we will cap the section off by exploring some core data visualization theory, and how to apply them to Charts and conditional formats.
Armed with the skills learned early on in this course, we will be ready to unlock one of Excel’s most powerful tools: the PivotTable. We will look at how to create them, update them, and control the variety of features to show our results the way we need to see them. From grouping to controlling aggregations to slicing and dicing, you’ll acquire the skills to summarize data sets of all sizes in seconds. You’ll also learn how the data flows through a PivotTable, and its impact on security.
After learning how to quickly summarize our data, we then need to turn our focus back to Data’s dirty little secret: that it’s rarely in a good shape that is ready to use. It’s dirty, misshapen, and spread across multiple files. It’s in text files, Excel files, and databases. It’s pivoted, transposed, and full of irrelevant records. Wouldn’t it be awesome if there was a built-in tool that allowed you to deal with all of those issues? Wouldn’t it be even more amazing if it recorded the data cleanup steps you wrote so that you could update it with a single click when the data changes? There is. It’s called Power Query. It’s built-in to Excel 2016 and higher and happens to be the focus of the next part of our workshop.
In addition to PivotTables, our boot camp will teach you how to access Power Query, how the tool works and the impact that it will have on your life. You’ll start by exploring how to append (stack) data sets in the same file, then expand this to appending data from multiple files into a single data set for analysis. We’ll cap this day by appending an entire folder full of files all at once… pure magic at work!
Lastly we will continue Power Query skill development. This section will show you 9 different ways to merge tables together, no matter where they come from. We’ll look at reshaping tabular data, pivoting and unpivoting it as needed. We will group data with ease, add conditional logic and even use the built-in toolset to build formulas by simply typing out the result we want, rather than the logic.
Target Audience
This training is targeted at users who:
- Have been working with Excel at a basic level/intermediate level,
- Possess basic formula skills, and
- Have experience with and/or routinely perform manual data cleanup in order to get data ready for analysis.
- Basic skills with IF() statements, PivotTables and Power Query are assets, but not required.
Course Structure
This course is a a hybrid format of pre-recorded video training interspersed with live online Q&A and coaching with Ken Puls, for direct help with your questions. The Boot Camp is broken down into two main sections:
Section 1: Course Curriculum
The main course curriculum includes 18 hours of training. The materials are delivered in a mixture of pre-recorded video training and hands-on practice over a 7-week semester with a weekly time commitment of approximately 2.5 hours per week. In addition, attendees will also have access to live 1/2 hour weekly Q&A sessions to ask questions related to the course material, for a total time estimate of 3 hours per week.
We understand that sometimes work can get in the way of the ability to attend live sessions. For this reason questions for the Q&A sessions may be submitted in advance, and all of the live Q&A sessions will be recorded and shared with participants. Thus, you will still be able to learn from the discussions even if you are not able to join Ken live (due to time zone conflicts, other commitments, etc.) or get called away for part of the session. This also allows you to watch the recordings on your own schedule, and to pause, rewind, and practice more with example files.
In addition, since your purchase (or renewal) provides access to the course for an entire year (from the start date of your initial semester), you are able to join any later semester as long as your subscription is active! That’s right – in the case that life knocks you offline, the next semester is open for you to either restart or pick up where you left off.
Section 2: Long Term Support
In addition to the main course curriculum, this course also includes access to monthly “Ask Me Anything” (AMA) sessions. Each of these optional sessions is 2 hours in length, conducted live, and recorded for later viewing. This is a great way to receive continued coaching on a longer-term basis, as you apply your skills in the real world and run into real world problems.
As with all of our training courses, we also provide access to our curated Skillwave Support Forum as well, allowing you to get answers on a quicker basis should you need more immediate help.
If you are not able to join us live for the Q&A or AMA’s, you can still submit your questions to Ken beforehand and he will answer them in the session. You will then be able to watch the answer later on in the session recording.
Total Training Hours
The core of this course contains 18 hours of training (15 hours of video and practice + 3 hours of Q&A sessions). In addition, attendees may also attended up to 24 hours of additional training via the optional AMA sessions, resulting in up to 32 hours of training in total.
Registration Details
This course is built on an annual subscription basis where every registration includes:
- One year of unlimited access to all of the Excel Fundamentals Boot Camp video materials,
- A seat at each AMA session held during the year,
- Access to the Q&A and AMA recording archive since the beginning of the course,
- The ability to post in our curated Skillwave Discussions Forum, and
- Our handy Power Query Recipes collection (including all new and updated cards for as long as you are subscribed).
Registration Link:
Because the video portion of this course is hosted through our Skillwave Training website, please click the link below to register through the Skillwave site.
