The Excel syllabus

The habits that make everything else easy — how cells, ranges and references really work, and the small set of moves you'll use ten thousand times.

1. 1.1 The grid mindset — cells, ranges and how Excel thinks
2. 1.2 SUM, AVERAGE and COUNT: the basics, done properly
3. 1.3 The fill handle — Excel's pattern engine
4. 1.4 Relative vs absolute references — the $ sign, demystified
5. 1.5 Number formats vs the value underneath
6. 1.6 Percentages without panic
7. 1.7 Keyboard habits that pay for themselves
8. 1.8 Freeze panes, splits and navigating big sheets
9. 1.9 Find & Replace: the underrated power tool
10. 1.10 Organising a workbook — sheets, tabs and structure
11. 1.11 Custom number formats — the pattern language

You leave this stage able to: You can build, navigate and read a small sheet fluently — and nothing about the grid surprises you any more.

Real spreadsheets start as someone else's mess. This stage is about taming it — structuring lists properly and cleaning imported data without touching it by hand.

1. 2.1 Format as Table — the feature that changes everything
2. 2.2 Sorting and filtering without wrecking your data
3. 2.3 The cleaning routine — spaces, casing, text-numbers, dates
4. 2.4 Text to Columns and Flash Fill
5. 2.5 Removing duplicates without losing data
6. 2.6 Paste Special: values, transpose and the multiply trick
7. 2.7 Structured references — formulas inside Tables
8. 2.8 Comparing two lists: new, missing, changed
9. 2.9 CSV, encoding and importing without damage
10. 2.10 Linked data types — geography, stocks and beyond coming

You leave this stage able to: You can take any export — however messy — and turn it into a clean, structured table, repeatably and without fear.

Where Excel stops being a calculator and starts answering questions — conditions, criteria and text logic that do the thinking for you.

1. 3.1 IF, IFS and nested logic done cleanly
2. 3.2 SUMIFS, COUNTIFS and AVERAGEIFS
3. 3.3 Text surgery: TEXTBEFORE, TEXTAFTER and TEXTSPLIT
4. 3.4 Working with dates — TODAY, EOMONTH, NETWORKDAYS
5. 3.5 IFERROR, IFNA and the art of failing loudly
6. 3.6 Named ranges — formulas that read like sentences
7. 3.7 ROUND and the case of the missing penny
8. 3.8 Auditing formulas: trace, evaluate, trust
9. 3.9 Top-N thinking: LARGE, SMALL and ranking
10. 3.10 SUMPRODUCT and the weighted average
11. 3.11 Time arithmetic — timesheets and the 24-hour trap
12. 3.12 The checks row — self-testing spreadsheets

You leave this stage able to: Your formulas answer questions — with conditions, dates and text logic that a colleague can read and audit.

The skill that separates users from power users — pulling the right value from another table, reliably, every time.

1. 4.1 XLOOKUP — the lookup you should learn first (and surviving VLOOKUP)
2. 4.2 INDEX and MATCH — the lookup with the hood open
3. 4.3 Matching messy keys between tables
4. 4.4 Spilled ranges and the
5. 4.5 Matching on more than one column — composite keys
6. 4.6 Approximate matches — banding, tiers and tax tables

You leave this stage able to: You can join data across tables and sheets reliably — and debug any lookup in minutes, including the inherited ones.

Turning a clean table into insight someone can act on — PivotTables, charts that tell the truth, and reports that update themselves.

1. 5.1 PivotTables from first principles
2. 5.2 Grouping, slicers and pivot layouts
3. 5.3 Charts that tell the truth
4. 5.4 Conditional formatting that highlights, not decorates
5. 5.5 Sparklines — tiny charts for big tables
6. 5.6 Building a one-page dashboard
7. 5.7 Print and PDF — sheets people can actually read
8. 5.8 Show Values As — shares, changes and running totals
9. 5.9 Histograms — the shape of your numbers
10. 5.10 Waterfall, Pareto and combo — the specialist charts
11. 5.11 Forecasting — trends and seasonality, honestly
12. 5.12 Accessible spreadsheets — sheets everyone can read coming

You leave this stage able to: You can turn a clean table into a self-updating report — honest charts, pivots, and a one-page dashboard someone reads in a minute.

The modern engine room — refreshable imports, formulas that spill, and the first steps into automating the boring parts entirely.

1. 6.1 Power Query — combine twelve monthly files in one click
2. 6.2 Power Query II: unpivot, merge and append
3. 6.3 Dynamic arrays — FILTER, SORT and UNIQUE
4. 6.4 LET and LAMBDA — formulas you can read
5. 6.5 GROUPBY and PIVOTBY — pivots as formulas
6. 6.6 Drop-down lists and bulletproof inputs
7. 6.7 Sheet protection — workbooks that survive other people
8. 6.8 Goal Seek — making Excel work backwards
9. 6.9 Data Tables — test every assumption at once
10. 6.10 Solver — optimisation for real decisions
11. 6.11 Your first macro (and when not to record one)
12. 6.12 Slow workbook? The performance habits
13. 6.13 The inheritable workbook
14. 6.14 When to leave Excel (and what for)
15. 6.15 Power Pivot and the data model — beyond a million rows
16. 6.16 Python in Excel — pandas meets the grid coming

You leave this stage able to: The monthly ritual runs itself — refreshable imports, spilling formulas, what-if models, and your first real automation.