Excel help and learning
Microsoft's official Excel help hub: short training, a full function reference, and step-by-step guides to XLOOKUP, PivotTables, data cleaning and charts. The most accurate free source for how Excel functions actually behave.
Guide
Other
Microsoft
Beginner
Free
What it is
Microsoft's Excel help and learning hub gathers the official training and support articles for Excel. It is organised around what you are trying to do: get started, formulas and functions, importing and analysing data, collaborating and formatting. It includes a list of every Excel function with its own page, and guides for the features analysts use daily, such as XLOOKUP, PivotTables, removing duplicates, data validation and charts.
Is it worth your time?
Yes, as your reference while you learn spreadsheets properly. Blog posts and videos often use old methods (VLOOKUP with a hard-coded column number, for example) or skip edge cases. Microsoft's own function pages show the exact syntax, optional arguments and examples you can paste into a sheet, which is what you need when a formula returns an error.
What to focus on for analysis
- Lookups: XLOOKUP, and why it replaces most uses of VLOOKUP and INDEX with MATCH.
- Conditional aggregation: SUMIFS, COUNTIFS and AVERAGEIFS.
- Text and dates: TRIM, TEXT, LEFT, DATE, EOMONTH, which do most of your cleaning.
- Dynamic arrays: FILTER, UNIQUE and SORT in current versions of Excel.
- PivotTables for summarising, and Excel tables (Ctrl+T) so ranges grow with your data.
- Power Query (Get and Transform) for repeatable cleaning; the same engine is in Power BI.
Free vs paid
The help content is free. Excel itself needs a Microsoft 365 licence or a standalone copy for the full desktop app, though Microsoft also offers Excel for the web with a free Microsoft account, with fewer features. Many universities provide Microsoft 365 to students; check with yours. If you do not have Excel, Google Sheets covers most of the same functions for free.
How to use it
When you meet a function in a tutorial, open its official page, read the arguments, then build a tiny example with ten rows where you know the right answer. Then use it on real data.
Common questions
Excel or Google Sheets? Learn whichever your target employers use; the concepts transfer. Many business teams run on Excel.
Do I need macros or VBA? Not for most entry-level analyst roles. Formulas, PivotTables and Power Query come first.
Ready to start?
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