Every lesson on this page is free. Pick the course that fits where you are, start with the fundamentals or jump into the full expert program. Workbooks included, no login and no credit card required.
Four courses built around real business spreadsheets. Learn by assembling commonly used tools at work.
The complete Excel program. 220+ lessons, follow-along videos, and a lifetime workbook to track every lesson and use as a reference guide forever.
Rate your comfort with 10 core Excel skills. We will tell you exactly which course to start with.
Rate each skill from 1 (not comfortable) to 3 (very comfortable). Max score = 30.
1. Comfort with SUM, AVERAGE, COUNT?
2. Comfort with PivotTables to summarize data?
The team doesn't have the skills to assemble useful reports, leaving leadership questioning contribution and impact.
You literally cannot afford mistakes when it comes to financial reports, budgets, or business data.
Spending more time creating reports than analyzing data seriously delays decisions and costs money.
Decisions are halted when data is missing or slow. Critical business opportunities can be missed.
Teams with varying skill levels make it near impossible to effectively report and share data.
Lacking reporting skills leads to anxiety, low morale, and turnover.
Feeling stressed or overwhelmed whenever you need to use Excel?
Relying on others to get your Excel tasks done slows you down. It's over.
No more fear of making mistakes that could corrupt your files or reports.
Limited Excel skills could hold you back from career advancement.
Most Excel training hides the useful material behind a paywall, a login screen or a monthly subscription. These courses do not.
All 280+ video lessons across Excel Foundations and Excel Xpert are free to watch, and the companion workbooks are free to download, with no account and no credit card required. You can open a lesson, follow along in your own spreadsheet and close the tab without ever handing over an email address.
The courses are taught by Nicole Hullihen, multi industry executive and multi year Microsoft MVP, who built every tool in these lessons for real business use before turning it into training. That is the difference you will notice first: instead of abstract practice files full of made-up data, you build an event planner, an order manager, a budget and a project tracker that you can actually keep using after the lesson ends.
I built Updoot to run and scale a business, and I use it every day for exactly that. But I will be straight with you about something I believe strongly: software does not replace knowing how to work with your own numbers. Every business I have run started in a spreadsheet, and the operators who did best were always the ones who could open the data themselves, dig into why a number moved and come to the table with an answer instead of a screenshot.
Excel is still where that analysis happens. When you need to test an assumption, compare two scenarios, pressure-test a budget before you commit to it or figure out which line item is quietly eating your margin, you need to be able to do that yourself rather than waiting on someone else to run it for you. Those skills are what let you walk into a decision with actual evidence, and they are what make a tool like Updoot far more useful once you scale into it, because you already understand the numbers flowing through it.
That is why I stopped charging for these courses and opened them up for free. I would rather more people be genuinely capable with their own data than gate a few hundred lessons behind a checkout page. Take them, build the tools, get comfortable analyzing your business, and when you are ready to automate what you have learned, Updoot will be there.
Both courses are free, so the only question is where you will get traction fastest. If you are not confident writing a formula from scratch, start with Foundations. If formulas are comfortable but pivot tables, lookups and dashboards are not, start with Xpert.
Foundations is 67 lessons across four mini-courses, and it teaches Excel in the order you would actually need it while building something. You start with entering and formatting data, move into your first formulas and cell references, then add tables, drop-downs, conditional formatting and finally a recorded macro. By the end you have four working tools and the core skills every other Excel task reuses.
Xpert is the complete program, 220+ lessons organized by topic rather than by project, so you can go straight to the skill you need. It covers SUMIFS and COUNTIF, VLOOKUP and XLOOKUP, pivot tables and calculated fields, conditional formatting and nested IF logic, 66 lessons on charts and dashboards, plus VBA, macros and interactive controls.
The quiz on this page rates your comfort across ten core Excel skills, from basic functions through dashboards and sheet protection, and points you to the right starting place. There is no wrong answer and no email required to see your result.
Between the two courses you cover essentially the full range of Excel skills a small business owner, analyst, coordinator or manager needs.
SUM, AVERAGE and COUNT are the starting point, but the lessons that change your workday are the conditional ones. SUMIF and SUMIFS total only the rows that match your criteria, COUNTIF tells you how often something occurred, and goal seek runs a calculation backwards from the result you need. You will also cover payment formulas for loans and financing, and time math for hours, shifts and durations.
Lookups pull matching data from one table into another, which is how you stop copying and pasting between sheets. VLOOKUP, XLOOKUP, HLOOKUP and MATCH are among the most requested skills on any job posting that mentions Excel, and the course covers all of them plus how to build a working search bar over your own data.
Pivot tables summarize thousands of rows into a readable table in seconds, then let you rearrange that summary by dragging fields around. The lessons cover building your first pivot, adding calculated fields for metrics your raw data does not contain, and using pivot charts to show results by month, region or category.
The largest block of lessons, because presenting the result is usually what gets a decision made. You will build every common chart type and then move into full dashboards with slicers, gauges, progress bars and KPI tiles, turning a sheet of numbers into a single screen someone can read without asking you questions.
Data almost never arrives clean. Trimming stray spaces, fixing inconsistent capitalization, splitting combined columns, removing duplicates and correcting number formats are the steps that make lookups and pivot tables work at all. This is the quiet section that prevents most of the errors people blame on Excel itself.
Once a process is repeatable, it should be a button. The courses cover recording macros without writing code, then move into VBA for user-defined functions, change notifications and active-cell highlighting. You will also add checkboxes, counters and radio buttons so a shared file is usable by people who did not build it.
Small businesses run on spreadsheets long before they can justify dedicated software. Most Excel training is written for corporate analysts working with clean sample data, not for an owner tracking orders, invoices, inventory and a project timeline in the same file.
The Order Manager course builds a real tracker with custom number formats, conditional formatting and slicers, so a long list tells you what needs attention instead of forcing you to read every row. The same structure works for inventory, client lists, service requests and job pipelines.
Budget spreadsheets fail when updating them takes an afternoon. The Basic Budget course covers filling formulas down a column, totaling across categories, and recording a macro so the monthly refresh is a single click. That is the difference between a budget you keep current and one you abandon in March.
The Project Tracker course adds checkboxes, status views and cleanup techniques like removing blank rows so the file stays readable as the project grows. It is the shortest course on the page and the one that most often turns a personal spreadsheet into something a team can share.
Each video runs about a minute or two and covers exactly one skill, and each one is matched to a tab in the free companion workbook. You pause the video, switch to the workbook, do the step yourself, then continue. Nothing requires you to watch a forty-minute lecture to reach the two minutes you needed.
Every lesson is published on all three platforms, so you can work through the course on a laptop next to your spreadsheet or scroll a few lessons on your phone during a break. There is no learning platform to log into and no progress you can lose.
Both courses include a workbook you download once and keep. Foundations gives you the four project files to build alongside the videos. The Xpert workbook doubles as a permanent reference guide, so when you need the syntax for XLOOKUP eight months from now, it is already on your machine.
If you have opened Excel, felt overwhelmed by the grid and closed it again, Foundations assumes exactly that starting point. Nothing in the first course requires prior knowledge, and you build something usable in the first session rather than practicing on sample data.
Most people who use Excel daily learned it by cobbling together whatever they needed and have real gaps, usually around absolute cell references, pivot tables or lookups. Xpert is organized by topic specifically so you can fill in the gaps without sitting through the parts you already know.
If your job involves reporting numbers to someone else, the charts, dashboards and pivot table lessons are where you will get the most value fastest. Being the person who can turn raw data into a clear one-page summary is a visible, promotable skill.
Excel appears on an enormous share of job postings, and the specific functions listed are almost always VLOOKUP or XLOOKUP, pivot tables and basic charting. All three are covered here in depth, free, and building real tools gives you something concrete to talk about in an interview.
No. The event planner goes over all main Excel functions but the others are here to reinforce skills. So if you can create an event planner and then apply the same skills to various other tools in these courses, you are much more likely to be successful in the real work environment.
Any and all! I've included what I think are the best samples after working in pharmaceutical, biotech, luxury goods, manufacturing, pricing, software, automotive, supply chain, warehousing, and distribution.
Any and all! These foundational skills apply across office administration, finance, purchasing, analyst roles, project management, billing, and executive leadership, basically any department where Excel is used.
No, this is the course only. You need to purchase Excel separately here.
