Excel is still the first tool most analysts use. Before SQL or Power BI, you are expected to clean a file, answer a manager's question with numbers and show it in a simple chart.
The analyst workflow in Excel
- Understand the question. What decision will this number help with?
- Get the data. From a file, a system export or a database.
- Clean it. Remove duplicates, fix dates and text, handle blanks.
- Analyse it. Formulas, pivot tables, and simple statistics.
- Show it. Charts and a short dashboard.
- Explain it. One clear insight and a suggested action.
Skills to learn
- Data cleaning and validation
- SUMIFS, COUNTIFS, lookups and text formulas
- Pivot tables and pivot charts
- Charts that tell a story
- Simple dashboards with slicers
- Thinking like an analyst: question, data, insight
Why projects matter
Hiring managers want to see that you can solve a real problem. A project that goes from a manager's request to a final report shows more than a list of functions.
Cellgrids Excel for Data and Business Analytics
This course starts from the basics and takes you to a full office project: clean data, analyse it with formulas and pivot tables, build a dashboard and present the result. It ends with a test and a certificate. Also read our data analyst interview questions.