Best Excel Courses & Certifications in 2026 (Tested, All Levels)

Last updated: August 2026. Written by Josh Hutcheson, OnlineCourseing editor. See our review methodology.

THE QUICK PICKS

Excel remains one of the highest-leverage skills you can learn, and it is also one of the most badly taught. The market is full of forty-hour video courses that cover every menu in order and leave you unable to build anything. Below are the seven Excel courses and classes we would actually recommend in 2026, ranked on merit and matched to what you are trying to do — plus a straight answer on Excel certification, which is what a large share of people searching this are really after.

Every rating, review count and last-updated date below was read from the course page in August 2026. Where a platform reports a different quantity from its neighbours — Udemy counts ratings and students, Coursera counts reviews and enrolments — we say which is which rather than flattening them into one number, because they are not comparable.

Best Excel courses in 2026, compared

Ratings read from each course page in August 2026. The rating base differs by platform and the numbers are not interchangeable: Udemy publishes ratings and student counts, Coursera publishes reviews and enrolments, DataCamp and 365 Data Science publish reviews.

How we picked

We loaded every course page in a real browser in August 2026 and recorded its live rating, review base and last-updated date. That matters more in Excel than in most subjects, because the long tail of Excel courses on every platform is full of material shot against Excel 2013 and never revisited — the interface has moved, the functions have moved, and dynamic arrays did not exist when much of it was recorded.

Three things got a course cut. Anything not substantively updated in the last two years, on the grounds that XLOOKUP and dynamic arrays are now the normal way to work and a course that teaches only VLOOKUP is teaching you the slow path. Anything that is a menu tour rather than a problem-solving course. And anything whose certificate is presented as an industry credential when it is a completion certificate — a distinction we deal with head-on in the certification section below.

We have not tried to rank a single winner for everyone, because Excel splits cleanly by job. The spreadsheet an accountant needs and the spreadsheet a marketing analyst needs overlap far less than the course marketing suggests.

The 7 best Excel courses, reviewed

1. Excel Skills for Business: Essentials — Coursera (best overall)

Macquarie University's course is the one we would put in front of most people. It carries a 4.9 rating from 51,178 reviews and has drawn 1,175,677 enrolments, which for a university-produced course is an unusually large evidence base — you are not gambling on a handful of reviews. It runs seven modules at a beginner level and forms the first course of the wider Excel Skills for Business Specialization, so there is a clear path onward if you want it.

What sets it apart is that it is taught as a business skills course rather than a software tour. The exercises are framed around tasks an employer would actually hand you, and the assessments make you build rather than recognise. The trade-off is pace: it is deliberately measured, and if you already know your way around a pivot table you will find the early modules slow. Completing it earns a Coursera certificate, which is a genuine signal of effort but is not the Microsoft credential — see below for that distinction.

View Excel Skills for Business →

2. Excel from Beginner to Advanced — Udemy (best value)

Kyle Pew's course is the default recommendation across most of the internet, and for once the consensus is right. It holds a 4.7 rating from 541,798 ratings with 1,818,217 students — among the largest evidence bases of any course on any platform — and, critically, it was last updated in July 2026. That currency is the reason it survives our two-year cut when most long-running Udemy Excel courses do not.

It genuinely does run beginner through advanced in one purchase, including pivot tables, lookup functions and an introduction to macros. If you want one course that takes you from opening the application to being the person in the office who fixes other people's spreadsheets, this is it. Two caveats. Udemy list prices are close to fictional — the course is on sale most of the time, so never pay the sticker — and the sheer length means you should treat it as a reference to work through in sections rather than a start-to-finish binge. Note also that its URL still contains “2013” from an earlier edition; the course itself has been re-recorded and is current.

Check the current Udemy price →

3. The Excel Bootcamp — Zero To Mastery (best project-based)

ZTM's bootcamp runs 22.5 hours across 193+ lessons with two projects, and the platform reports that students take an average of 34 days to finish it. That last number is the useful one: it tells you this is a structured commitment rather than something you dip into, and it sets a realistic expectation that most course pages will not give you.

Coverage runs from formulas and functions through data visualisation and pivot tables to VBA macros, and the projects are the differentiator — you finish with something built rather than a list of features seen. ZTM is a subscription rather than a one-off purchase, which is worth weighing: it only makes sense if you will use more than the Excel material, and it becomes expensive if you finish in a month and forget to cancel. If you want a single course you own outright, pick 2 instead.

See the ZTM Excel Bootcamp →

4. Data Analysis in Excel — DataCamp (best for hands-on analysis)

DataCamp's course is short by design — 3 hours, 9 videos and 28 exercises, rated 4.8+ from 5,162 reviews and updated in July 2026. What you are buying is the interface: you work in a browser-based environment that checks your answer at each step, so you cannot passively watch your way through it the way you can with video.

For pivot tables, summarising data and the analysis end of Excel specifically, that format is the fastest route from not knowing to being able to do it. It is not a general Excel course and does not pretend to be — there is no formatting, no charts-for-presentation, no macros. Take it as a targeted supplement alongside pick 1 or 2 rather than as your only course. It is also the best fit if you already suspect your next step after Excel is SQL or Python.

View DataCamp's Excel course →

5. Excel Fundamentals for Data Analysis — Coursera (best for analysts wanting a credential)

The intermediate-level counterpart to pick 1, also from Macquarie, rated 4.8 from 4,328 reviews with 234,494 enrolments across six modules. It sits inside the Excel Skills for Data Analytics and Visualization Specialization, so it is the natural continuation if you finished Essentials and want the analyst track rather than the general business track.

It goes deeper on cleaning and shaping data than any other pick here — the unglamorous work that actually consumes an analyst's day. Choose this over DataCamp's course when you want the credential and the structure; choose DataCamp when you want the fastest hands-on route and do not care about a certificate. Being explicitly intermediate, it assumes you already know your way around formulas, so do not start here cold.

View Excel Fundamentals for Data Analysis →

6. Beginner to Pro in Excel: Financial Modeling and Valuation — Udemy (best for finance)

365 Careers' course carries a 4.5 rating from 61,505 ratings with 262,481 students, and was updated in August 2026 — the most recently refreshed course on this list. It is the right pick if your Excel problem is specifically a finance problem: three-statement models, DCF valuation, and the modelling conventions that finance teams expect you to already know.

The 4.5 rating is the lowest here and that is worth reading honestly rather than glossing: the course moves quickly and assumes more comfort with finance concepts than its “beginner to pro” title implies. If you are new to both Excel and finance, do a general course first. If you are heading for investment banking, equity research or FP&A specifically, the modelling conventions here are more valuable than another general Excel course — and you may want to compare it against a dedicated credential in our best financial modeling courses guide.

Check the current price →

7. Advanced Microsoft Excel — 365 Data Science (best for power users)

Taught by Ned Krastev and Martin Ganchev, this is 3 hours across 32 lessons at an explicitly advanced level, rated 4.9 from 870 reviews with 37,212 students. The review base is far smaller than the Udemy and Coursera picks, so weight the rating accordingly — 870 reviews is meaningful but it is not 51,000.

It earns its place by refusing to re-teach the basics. If you are already competent and want the specific advanced techniques — the function combinations, the modelling patterns, the things that separate a working spreadsheet from a maintainable one — three focused hours is a better use of your time than another forty-hour comprehensive course. Do not buy it as your first Excel course; it will lose you.

View Advanced Microsoft Excel →

Excel certification: which one actually matters?

This is where most Excel guides are vague, so here is the direct answer. There is exactly one Excel certification that is a credential rather than a completion certificate, and it comes from Microsoft. Everything else — Coursera certificates, Udemy certificates of completion, platform badges — is evidence that you finished a course. That has real value on a CV, but it is a different thing, and conflating the two is how people end up disappointed.

The Microsoft Office Specialist (MOS) exams

Microsoft runs two Excel certifications for Microsoft 365 Apps, and they are separate exams you book and sit:

Both are priced at $100 USD, though Microsoft notes the price varies by the country or region in which the exam is proctored, so check your own. Both carry a renewal frequency of 60 months — five years, which is unusually long for a technology certification and makes the cost easier to justify. The Associate exam is offered in fifteen languages including Arabic, Simplified and Traditional Chinese, German, Greek, Spanish, French, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Dutch, Brazilian Portuguese, Russian and Vietnamese.

The Associate exam covers creating and managing worksheets and workbooks, cells and ranges, tables, formulas and functions, and managing charts. The Expert exam covers the advanced feature set. If you are a student, Microsoft directs you to schedule through Certiport rather than the standard route — worth knowing, because school and university testing centres are often materially cheaper.

There is also an umbrella credential, Microsoft Office Specialist: Associate (Microsoft 365 Apps), earned by passing three exams across different programs rather than three Excel exams. That is the one to target if your role spans Word and PowerPoint as well as Excel.

So should you bother?

Our honest read: for most office roles, no. Employers overwhelmingly test Excel by giving you a spreadsheet task at interview, not by checking for MO-210. The certification earns its keep in three specific situations — when a job posting names it explicitly, when you are early-career and need something concrete on a thin CV, and when you are in a temp or contract market where an agency screens on credentials before a human sees you. Outside those, the $100 and the study time are usually better spent building something you can show.

Note that none of the seven courses above is an official MO-210 or MO-211 prep course. They teach Excel; the exams test a defined and slightly different skills outline. If certification is your actual goal, work through the exam skills outline on Microsoft Learn alongside whichever course you pick.

Which Excel course is right for your level?

Complete beginner

If you are not confident writing a formula, start with Excel Skills for Business: Essentials (pick 1) or Excel from Beginner to Advanced (pick 2). Choose Coursera if you want structure, deadlines and a credential; choose Udemy if you want to own it outright, work at your own pace and pay less. Do not start with picks 4, 5 or 7 — DataCamp assumes you can already navigate a spreadsheet, and the Coursera analytics course and the 365 Data Science course are explicitly intermediate and advanced respectively.

Intermediate — you use Excel but avoid the hard parts

This is the most common and least well-served position: you are fine with formulas, you can make a chart, and pivot tables make you nervous. The highest-value move here is not another general course but a targeted one. Data Analysis in Excel (pick 4) will fix pivot tables and summarisation in an afternoon. Excel Fundamentals for Data Analysis (pick 5) is the deeper version with a credential attached. If your gap is specifically finance, go to pick 6.

Advanced — you are the spreadsheet person already

If colleagues bring you their broken workbooks, skip the comprehensive courses entirely. Advanced Microsoft Excel (pick 7) is three hours aimed squarely at you, and The Excel Bootcamp (pick 3) is worth it for the VBA and project work if automation is the gap. At this level the MOS Expert exam (MO-211) also starts to make sense, because you are close to passing it already and it is the one Excel credential an employer can verify.

Excel classes vs Excel courses: live, on-demand, or interactive?

People search for Excel classes and Excel courses more or less interchangeably, but they can mean three genuinely different formats, and picking the wrong one is the most common reason people give up.

On-demand video is what picks 1, 2, 3, 5, 6 and 7 are. You watch, you follow along, you go at your own pace. It is the cheapest and most flexible option, and it has the worst completion rates of the three, because nothing external requires you to show up.

Interactive, browser-based practice is what DataCamp (pick 4) does. There is no local Excel file — you work in the platform and it checks each step. This suits people who watch a video, feel they understood it, and then discover they cannot reproduce it. If that describes you, this format is worth paying more for.

Live, scheduled classes — an instructor, a fixed time, other students — are the third option, and none of our seven picks is one. They cost substantially more and they are the right answer for exactly one reason: if you know from experience that you do not finish self-paced material, a scheduled class buys you the commitment device. Be honest with yourself about which of those three you are, because the format matters more to whether you finish than the syllabus does.

Free ways to learn Excel

A paid course is not the only route, and for some people it is not the best one. Microsoft's own support and training documentation is thorough, current with the Microsoft 365 feature set, and free — it is a reference rather than a curriculum, so it works better for looking things up than for learning from zero. YouTube has genuinely excellent Excel teaching, with the caveat that quality varies wildly and you have no syllabus, so you learn what the algorithm shows you rather than what you need next.

The most underrated free option is your own work. Take a spreadsheet you already use, decide what it should do that it currently does not, and make it do that. You will learn the functions in the order you actually need them, which is the opposite of how most courses sequence material, and you finish with something useful rather than a certificate.

Where paid courses earn their money is sequencing and accountability. If you have tried the free route and stalled, that is the signal to pay — the money is buying structure, not information.

The Excel skills that actually get you hired

Course syllabuses are ordered by feature, which is not the order these things matter in a job. If you are choosing between the picks above, it helps to know which specific skills separate someone who “knows Excel” from someone an employer will actually pay for.

Lookups — and why VLOOKUP is now the wrong answer

Pulling a value from one table into another is the single most common real task in Excel. For two decades the answer was VLOOKUP, and a great many courses still teach it as the primary method. XLOOKUP replaced it in the Microsoft 365 versions of Excel: it searches in either direction, does not break when someone inserts a column, and handles the not-found case without wrapping everything in an error handler. If a course spends an hour on VLOOKUP and mentions XLOOKUP in passing at the end, that is a reliable sign the material predates 2020 and was patched rather than re-recorded. It is one of the fastest ways to judge whether a course is genuinely current.

Pivot tables, and why people avoid them

Pivot tables are the highest-leverage feature in Excel and the one competent users most often skip, usually because a first encounter went badly. They turn a summarising job that takes an afternoon of formulas into about ninety seconds of dragging fields. If you take one thing from this page, make it this: the gap between not using pivot tables and using them comfortably is a couple of hours, and it changes what you can be asked to do. DataCamp's course (pick 4) is the most efficient route to that specific skill because it makes you build them rather than watch someone else build them.

Dynamic arrays and structured tables

Modern Excel spills results across cells automatically, and functions like FILTER, SORT and UNIQUE replace patterns that used to require elaborate helper columns. Combined with proper structured tables — naming a range as a table so formulas reference columns by name and expand automatically — this is the difference between a spreadsheet that survives being edited and one that quietly breaks. Very little older material covers it, which is precisely why the last-updated date on a course matters more in Excel than in most subjects.

Power Query, and when VBA is still the answer

If your real problem is that the same messy file arrives every week and you clean it by hand, the answer is usually Power Query rather than macros: you define the cleaning steps once and re-run them on next week's file. It is underrepresented in general Excel courses relative to how much time it saves. VBA still earns its place for automating things Power Query cannot reach and for interacting with other applications, and it remains common enough in established finance and operations teams that inheriting someone's macros is a normal experience. The Excel Bootcamp (pick 3) is the pick here if automation is your gap.

A sensible order, if you are starting from little: formulas and cell references, then structured tables, then lookups with XLOOKUP, then pivot tables, then charts that communicate rather than decorate, and only then automation. Most people who stall do so because they attempted automation before they were fluent with tables and lookups, which is like learning to run before you can reliably walk.

Frequently asked questions

What is the best Excel course overall?

Excel Skills for Business: Essentials from Macquarie University on Coursera, rated 4.9 from 51,178 reviews with over 1.17 million enrolments. It teaches Excel as a business skill rather than a software tour and carries a certificate. If you would rather own a course outright and pay less, Kyle Pew's Excel from Beginner to Advanced on Udemy is the better value.

Is there an official Excel certification?

Yes. Microsoft Office Specialist: Excel Associate is exam MO-210, and Excel Expert is exam MO-211. Both cost $100 USD, though the price varies by the country or region where the exam is proctored, and both have a 60-month renewal frequency. Course certificates from Coursera, Udemy or any other platform are completion certificates, not the Microsoft credential.

Is Excel certification worth it?

For most office roles, no — employers usually test Excel with a practical task at interview rather than checking for a certification. It is worth it in three cases: when a job posting names it, when you are early-career and need something concrete on a thin CV, or when agencies screen you before a human does. The 60-month renewal window does make the $100 easier to justify than most tech certifications.

What is the best Excel course for beginners?

Excel Skills for Business: Essentials on Coursera is explicitly beginner-level across seven modules, or Excel from Beginner to Advanced on Udemy if you prefer to work at your own pace. Avoid DataCamp's Data Analysis in Excel, Coursera's Excel Fundamentals for Data Analysis and 365 Data Science's Advanced Microsoft Excel as a first course — they assume existing competence.

What is the best advanced Excel course?

Advanced Microsoft Excel from 365 Data Science — three hours across 32 lessons at an explicitly advanced level, rated 4.9 from 870 reviews. It does not re-teach the basics, which is exactly what makes it useful if you are already competent. For automation and VBA specifically, The Excel Bootcamp from Zero To Mastery goes further.

How long does it take to learn Excel?

For everyday working competence — formulas, tables, charts, basic pivot tables — a few focused weeks is realistic. Zero To Mastery reports that students take an average of 34 days to complete its 22.5-hour bootcamp, which is a reasonable benchmark. Reaching the level tested by the MOS Expert exam takes considerably longer, and most people get there through work rather than study.

Are Excel classes better than self-paced courses?

Only if you do not finish self-paced material. Live scheduled classes cost substantially more, and what you are buying is the commitment device rather than better teaching. If you have started and abandoned an online course before, that is the signal to pay for a scheduled class; otherwise on-demand video or interactive practice will teach you the same content for less.

Which Excel course is best for data analysis?

DataCamp's Data Analysis in Excel for the fastest hands-on route — three hours, 28 exercises, browser-based practice that checks each step. Coursera's Excel Fundamentals for Data Analysis is the deeper option with a credential, and goes further on cleaning and shaping data. Take DataCamp if you want speed, Coursera if you want the certificate.