Who this course is for
Anyone who works with numbers but is not a data specialist: business owners, managers, accountants, sales and operations staff, students and analysts starting out. If you can use Excel or Google Sheets at a basic level, you can take this course.
There is no advanced maths. Where an idea matters, such as averages vs medians or why trends can mislead, it is explained in plain language with business examples.
What you will learn
- How to turn a vague request ("look at the sales data") into clear, useful questions
- How to check and prepare data so the analysis can be trusted
- How to summarise and compare with formulas and pivot tables, with AI building them
- How to read trends over time without fooling yourself
- How to make charts that are clear and honest
- What simple forecasting can and cannot do
- How to turn findings into a one-page report that leads to a decision
How this course uses AI
AI is your guide and assistant: it suggests questions, explains concepts, writes formulas, plans pivot tables and drafts the summary. Excel (or Sheets) does the calculating on your full data, and you check that the results make sense.
This split matters. AI assistants can make arithmetic mistakes, and pasting large amounts of customer or company data into public AI tools is a privacy risk.
What you need
- Excel (Microsoft 365 recommended; Excel 2016 or later works for most lessons) or Google Sheets
- Any AI assistant: ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude or Microsoft Copilot
- A dataset to practise on: your own sales, expenses or orders with names removed, or a made-up table
For more Excel skills, our AI for Excel course is a good companion.
How to take this course
One new lesson is released every day. Each lesson ends with a practice task using your own data. Click Mark as complete at the end of each lesson to track your progress.