Free forever
Spreadsheet Fundamentals
Every Excel course teaches you which formula to type. Almost none of them teach you what you are typing it at — and that is where analyst work actually goes wrong. A total that is quietly too small, a filter that returns one row instead of three, a report that was right last month. None of those are formula mistakes.
This course is the other half: what a cell and a range really are, why a column has a type even though nothing enforces it, what one row is supposed to mean, and how to keep raw data and the report you build from it apart. Short chapters, one idea each, every example running live on a real grid.
It is a companion to the Excel tutorial, not a prerequisite — read them in either order, or side by side. Both are free, and both stay free.
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What the grid is
3 chaptersCells, references and types, and the one rule about rows every formula depends on.
- 01What a spreadsheet really is5 minA grid of values, not a document — and the difference between the part you type and the part you derive.
- 02A column has a type anyway6 minExcel will not refuse a bad value the way a database does, so the type problem moves into your formula.
- 03One row per record7 minThe single layout rule every formula depends on — and the three ways a sheet made for reading breaks it.
Making it computable
1 chapterHeader rows, ranges that keep up with the data, and what an empty cell actually means.
The last chapters of this course — blank versus zero, keeping raw data and summary apart, and what sorting and filtering quietly change — are still being written.
Where to go next
These chapters are about the shape of the data. Once it is shaped right, the formulas are the easy half.
- The Excel tutorial — the formulas themselves, from your first
=to cross-tabs without a pivot table. Free. - Graded Excel questions — the same loop as the SQL bank, marked in your browser.
- Database Fundamentals — the same conceptual layer for SQL: what a table is, and the constraints that keep it honest. Also free.