What is Excel?
At its base level, Microsoft Excel is a spreadsheet application. However, its capabilities stretch far beyond simply storing and sharing data. Excel is a versatile piece of software that can be used to create visualizations, analyze data, and automate tasks. It can simplify datasets in Pivot Tables and even has its own programming language, VBA (Visual Basic for Applications). Like the other applications in the Microsoft Office suite, Excel is most often found and used in businesses, schools, and home offices.
While Excel is powerful by itself, it becomes even more powerful when used in combination with other apps. Excel integrates with other applications in the Microsoft Office suite, broadening the ways it can be used. You can connect Excel to PowerPoint to insert a chart into your slideshow or to Project to import data. Excel can also be integrated with a number of popular business applications outside of the Microsoft Office suite, such as QuickBooks, Hubspot, and Salesforce.
Why Learn Excel?
In the professional world, Excel is the industry-standard spreadsheet app. While there are alternatives, such as Google Sheets, Apple Numbers, and Smartsheet, none have the same level of usage as Excel. You will find it employed in home and business offices around the world. Companies and organizations in the financial, tech, commercial, health, education, and government sector use Excel.
Knowing Excel is also useful outside of the workplace. Students in grade school or university may use Excel to make charts for reports and presentations, complete assignments for a business class, or for other projects. If you volunteer for a nonprofit, run a club, or have a side job, you can use Excel to store and sort contact information. You can also use Excel’s many templates to make calendars, planners, personal finance trackers, and even grocery lists.
What Careers Use Excel?
Many office jobs require a basic use of Excel along with other popular Microsoft Office apps like Word, PowerPoint, and Outlook. Working as an administrative assistant, office manager, or another desk job that requires coordinating and organizing day-to-day business activities may involve frequent use of Excel. However, knowing Excel is expected of pretty much anyone who uses a computer on a regular basis for their work.
Excel is especially important for careers in finance. Working as a financial analyst, investment analyst, or investment banker will require heavy Excel use. Professionals in these industries rely on it to build financial models, complete calculations, and make visualizations for reports or presentations. Analysts in other industries use Excel as well. Some examples are business analysts, marketing analysts, and digital analysts. They rely on Excel to store and analyze data from sales and marketing campaigns.
What Excel Classes Are Available?
Taking an Excel course can be a great way to build career-oriented skills in fundamental skills like functions, formulas, and calculations as well as specialized skills like VBA programming and financial modeling. There are many training schools that offer Excel classes and certifications, including NYIM. You can find a wide range of Excel courses available to attend at our location in NYC or live online.
If you’re a new learner who wants to learn Excel fundamentals, check out the Excel for Business Bootcamp. This class starts with a review of Excel’s interface, formatting options, and basic calculations. From there, you’ll learn about Pivot Tables, lookup functions, and other more challenging material. By the end of the course, you’ll know advanced functions and basic macro creation. No matter what industry you’re in, the Excel for Business Bootcamp will give you relevant skills that you can apply right away.
Are you interested in learning high-level Excel skills for a finance career? There are a couple of courses you may want to consider. NYIM’s Financial Modeling Bootcamp combines advanced Excel training with lessons in corporate finance and accounting, valuation principles, and discount cash flow modeling. In the course, students use real-world financial data to create a valuation model and analyze the model to determine whether the business is a good investment. This class is best for students who already have intermediate knowledge of Excel. For a more beginner-friendly course, you can enroll in the Financial Analyst Training Program. This program kicks off with basic and intermediate Excel training before moving on to advanced Excel, corporate finance, financial modeling, and investment principles.
Programming macros allows you to automate common tasks in Excel and save time. To learn how to record and edit macros, use the VBA editor to write code, and use VBA to prevent errors, you can take Excel Programming with VBA. This course is suitable for anyone with intermediate-level Excel skills. No prior experience in VBA programming is required.
Certifications for Excel
Want to take your knowledge of Excel to the next level? Earning a Microsoft Office Specialist (MOS) certification will help you master the use of Excel in professional settings and stand out to employers. At NYIM, you can prepare for and take the exams for two Excel MOS certifications: the Excel Specialist Certification and the Excel Expert Certification. The Excel Specialist Certification Program and Excel Expert Certification Program both include NYIM’s full Excel Bootcamp, private tutoring in Excel, study guides, and a proctored exam with a free retake.
NYIM also runs programs that allow you to earn multiple MOS certifications, including Excel. The Microsoft Master Certification Program with Access provides training, tutoring, and certification exams for Excel, PowerPoint, Word, and Access. The Microsoft Master Certification Program with Outlook prepares you to earn certification in Excel, PowerPoint, Word, and Outlook.
What Should I Learn Besides Excel?
While Excel is useful as a standalone skill, it becomes even more versatile when combined with other business skills, especially those related to analytics and common office processes.
Learning other Microsoft Office apps is a good idea for anyone planning to take Excel classes. Many careers that involve the use of Excel require a background in other Microsoft Office software. Knowing how to use popular applications like Word, PowerPoint, and Outlook along with Excel will give you the skills to be successful at many basic office tasks. Excel can also be an entry point to Microsoft Office applications with a similar interface. For example, Project and Access both share features with Excel and have visual commonalities. They also both support Excel imports.
For those working in data or business analytics, it can be helpful to learn SQL and Tableau. SQL is a programming language used to query, organize, sort, and filter data stored in large databases. Tableau is an industry-standard data visualization app that can be used to generate complex charts, graphs, and maps. Learning SQL and Tableau will let you take your knowledge of data analytics to the next level. While Excel will allow you to complete basic tasks related to storing, analyzing, and visualizing data, you’ll need to know SQL and Tableau to be competitive for most analyst positions.
Another direction you can take after learning Excel is to learn Python. Python is a beginner-friendly coding language that data scientists, machine learning engineers, data analysts, and FinTech professionals use to clean and draw insight from large amounts of raw data. By developing experience in Python and widely used data science packages like NumPy, Matplotlib, and Pandas, you can broaden your career opportunities in a data-related field.
Excel Classes in NYC
Microsoft Excel is one of the most commonly used software applications in the world and it plays a vital role in almost every facet of data-driven professional fields. Excel allows users to store, organize, manipulate, visualize and query large amounts of personal, financial and administrative data, and it provides a convenient tool that can handle large and small spreadsheet-related tasks. While Excel is a powerful and ubiquitous program, it is also an incredibly accessible program, so if you are only using the program for its most barebones features, it is still very useful to learn. This also means that there is no shortage of beginner and advanced training programs available for students looking to find the perfect course offering to fit their needs in NYC.
Why Learn Excel in NYC
NYC is one of the country’s most important financial centers and home to some of the country's largest investment and financial institutions. As such, there is no shortage of open jobs in administration, data analytics and financial services, and none of these jobs would be possible without a firm knowledge of Microsoft Excel. Data entry, organization and analysis are vital parts of almost every white color financial job you can apply for, and New York City has these jobs available in abundance, especially if you are interested in working on Wall Street or at a major corporation.
Excel is very commonly utilized in data analytics contexts, particularly in the day-to-day work of Data Analysts and Data Scientists. Data Analysts are professionals who are tasked with collecting and analyzing data for a company or institution. They will then use that data analysis to make recommendations or forecasts that the company or institution can use to inform the company's decisions regarding things like investments or marketing decisions. In NYC, Data Analysts make approximately $85,000 annually. Data Scientists are computer science professionals who make data analytics possible by developing and programming the tools and applications that read, interpret and query large data sets. Data Scientists also work with developing artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies intended to automate the data collection and interpretation process to make the process more efficient. In NYC, a Data Scientist starting salary averages about $125,000.
Since New York is home to so many massive financial institutions and businesses, the city is also a great place to find work as a Financial Analyst or an Investment Banker. Certified Public Accountants also need to understand how to use Excel. Financial Analysts and CPAs are both responsible for maintaining and analyzing the financial data of a company or institution. Financial Analysts are like data analysts who specialize in forecasting a company’s financial position, market futures, investment opportunities and any other financial data-related concerns. In NYC, they earn about $81,000 annually. CPAs deal with the book-keeping side of financial accounting, and they are tasked with maintaining, analyzing and preparing financial documents and reports for massive corporations. In NYC, they earn about $127,000 annually. Investment Bankers focus their attention on investment and asset management, helping clients (companies, institutions and individuals) make sound investment and long-term financial planning decisions. In NYC, an average Investment Banker earns about $113,000.
All of these careers require knowledge of Excel, but they also require significant additional training. Investment Bankers and CPAs will need a detailed understanding of financial markets, laws and regulations and Analysts and Data Scientists will need to know how to use FinTech tools and will likely need to learn the basics of coding (or advanced coding skills for Data Scientists).
Best Live Excel Classes in NYC
If you live in NYC and are looking for a live Excel training program, there is no shortage of options available to you. NYIM Training offers an immersive Excel for Business Bootcamp that covers the most commonly utilized functionalities of the application across a range of professional contexts. In this course, students will learn the basics of data input and the use of spreadsheets for organizing information, and they will learn how to automate large portions of the data processing tasks using tools like functions, formulas and even self-written macros. Students will also learn how to use tools like VLOOKUP and Pivot Tables for more advanced data management tasks, and they will learn how to create charts and graphs using Excel’s data visualization functionalities. Upon completion of the course, students will have a fairly robust knowledge of all of the different major features of the application.
Students looking for a more advanced dive into Excel’s features may want to take NYIM’s Excel Programming with VBA course. This course will provide students with training in Visual Basic for Applications, the programming language utilized by Microsoft Excel. By learning this language, you will be able to add a ton of modular, customizable features to your Excel spreadsheets, and you will be able to integrate Excel spreadsheets more easily with other applications and programs. Learning VBA is an essential skill for anyone looking to write programs that utilize Excel spreadsheets, and it is useful if you are simply aiming to become more efficient with your Excel skills.
If you are interested in a more career-oriented class, Noble Desktop offers a Data Analytics Certificate program that will provide you with all of the training you need to find work as a Business Analyst or Data Analyst. In this course, students will learn how to use Excel for data analytic tasks and how to build complex databases using Excel. Then, students will learn how to use programming languages like Python and SQL to query, maintain and manipulate those databases. In this program, students will also learn how to use common data analytic and visualization applications, and they will learn the basics of working with machine learning algorithms. This course is more than an Excel class, and it aims to prepare students for entry into the workforce.
NY Career Centers offers a Microsoft Excel Bootcamp that aims to provide students with all of the basic training that they will need to regularly use Microsoft Excel in a professional context. This is a beginner-friendly course, so students without much prior experience can easily pick up the basics of the application, including things as straightforward as basic data entry, creating and organizing cells and utilizing built-in formulas. Once students are comfortable with the basics of the program, they will learn how to utilize more advanced features, like VLOOKUP, INDEX and MATCH tools, to help automate the data entry and analysis process. For students only interested in learning the application basics, NY Career Centers also offers a Beginner Microsoft Excel course.
Sprintzeal Americas Inc. offers an advanced Microsoft Excel Training course that aims to help professionals in virtually any field become familiar with the practical uses of Excel. In this class, students will spend three days learning all of the most commonly used features of the program, including Excel assistant and the application's macro and formula writing functions. This course will also cover strategies and tips for managing large databases and organizing and interpreting data in an efficient manner. Students will also receive training in using Pivot Tables and Pivot Charts.
Practical Programming offers a FinTech Bootcamp that will teach students looking to work in the financial and investment banking industries how to best take advantage of developments in financial technology. This includes lessons in the use of Excel as a tool for building complex financial databases and automating the process of inputting, calculating and forecasting financial data. Students will also learn how to use programming languages like Python and SQL to streamline the analysis process, and students will be introduced to the basics of machine learning algorithms and artificial intelligence programs that automate much of the complex data analysis process.
High school students looking to get a handle on Excel may want to consider enrolling in NextGen Bootcamp’s Excel, Finance and Investing Summer Program. This summer course aims to introduce students to the basics of financial analysis and investing, both of which require an understanding of the fundamentals of Microsoft Excel. In this course, students will learn how to keep track of their personal finances, assets and investments and how to use Excel to organize and forecast financial information. Students will learn how to read business reports and financial valuation statements, and they will learn the logics and structures of the stock market, including practical advice on how Excel literacy can help them keep track of the valuations of their assets. This course is an ideal introduction to practical personal finance management and entrepreneurship and investment, making it a solid summer program for any high schooler interested in pursuing a career in finance or simply hoping to pick up practical life skills.