Microsoft Excel has more than 1 billion users worldwide.

Whether you’re a data professional or just getting started, Excel provides a user-friendly interface for working with data in every phase of the analytics process: data cleaning, prep, analysis, and visualization.

And the best part? ANYONE can learn the foundations of Excel in just a matter of minutes – for free!

In this demo, we’ll play the role of an entry-level data analyst for a local toy store 🧸

We’ve been given access to a spreadsheet with ~15,000 sales records for 35 different products, and our task is to use that data to understand things like weekday vs. weekend revenue, monthly trending, and top products.

Using Excel, we’ll transform the raw data into a user-friendly, interactive dashboard to help our manager better understand revenue patterns across product categories.

Along the way, we’ll walk through key steps of the analytics workflow:

1. Create calculated columns using formulas & functions

2. Perform exploratory data analysis with pivot tables

3. Visualize data with charts & graphs

4. Build a stunning, interactive dashboard

…all in less than 20 minutes!