Review of Free Online Microsoft Excel Courses and Tutorials

Baycon Group offers a free Microsoft Excel 2007 Tutorial, among other Office, Photoshop, and Flash tutorials. The tutorial has very clear screenshots, some with added features (i.e. arrows) to ensure understanding. There are exercises evenly spaced throughout the tutorials to help reinforce learning. These online Excel courses offer a number of benefits, including advancing your career options.

Lesson 1 covers Entering Text and Numbers into Excel. The tutorial covers the main toolbars and buttons, as well as cell data and text wrapping. Shortcuts are taught as well. This section can be skipped by users with a basic knowledge of Excel, but it is a good refresher to those of us who haven't used it in awhile.

Lesson 2 covers formulas and formatting. Calculations, AutoSum, aligning, columns and rows, background colors, font colors, and basic features with text (i.e. bold and italics).

Lesson 3 covers the creation of Excel functions, filling cells automatically, headers and footers, and printing.

Lesson 4 is the last lesson and it covers charts and all of the basics of charting.

Barak Sofer is a cognitive psychologist who has previous experience as an IT teacher. He made a free website to teach Excel and Word via video and manual instructions. He offers a full Excel tutorial available for purchase from DeluxeTraining. The videos do not have sound, but there are text instructions incorporated into the videos. The tutorials cover basic functions, calculations and special features such as sorting, filtering, formatting, charting, and creating drop-down lists.

MotionTraining on YouTube offers 18 free Excel video tutorials. His profile does not state what his background is, but he gives excellent and clear instructions. The tutorials range from a beginning overview, getting started, formatting, charts, functions and calculations. He also offers a separate 3-part VLOOKUP function tutorial and a REPT function tutorial. These tutorials are great for those who learn better visually.

Dave Hawley of Ozgrid offers a free basic/level 1 excel training that consists of 38 lessons. They offer a more advanced training course for purchase that comes with Excel question support for life. The lessons are purely text with no screen shots, but they are clear and concise. The tutorials cover basic functions, formulas, shortcuts, features and charting. The site also offers free Excel content, examples, and add-ons for download.

Home and Learn also offers an 8-section tutorial on Excel 2007. The entirety of tutorials spans from basics to advanced functions. Most free online Excel tutorials only offer basic training, but this course will cover some advanced features as well. These features include data forms, drop down lists, web integration, object linking and embedding, and drawing objects.