7 lessons College students in any major
Excel & Google Sheets for Students
7 practical lessons built around real college tasks: tracking your grade, analyzing lab data, summarizing survey results and building a budget. Brand new to spreadsheets? Start with the Excel for Beginners course first.
All lessons
- 🎓 1. A grade tracker with weighted averagesSUMPRODUCT, absolute references and “what do I need on the final?”
- 🧪 2. Cleaning and formatting lab dataTables, number formats, rounding, sorting and filtering
- 🔀 3. IF, COUNTIF and AVERAGEIFLabel results and summarize by condition
- 🔍 4. XLOOKUP and VLOOKUPPull matching data from another table
- 🧮 5. Pivot tablesSummarize hundreds of rows in a few clicks
- 📊 6. Charts for reportsPick the right chart, label it and keep it clean
- 💵 7. Project: a student budgetIncome, expenses, categories, a pivot and a chart
✏️ Practice: Online spreadsheet: practice formulas without installing anything
About this course
Spreadsheets show up in almost every major: lab reports in the sciences, data in psychology and business, budgets in student organizations, and research projects everywhere. Employers list Excel among the most requested skills for internships.
Everything works in Excel (free for most students through Microsoft 365 Education) and Google Sheets. Where they differ, both ways are shown.
Questions & answers
- Is Excel free for college students?
- Most US colleges give students Microsoft 365 (including Excel) free with their school email. Google Sheets is free with any Google account.
- XLOOKUP or VLOOKUP?
- XLOOKUP is newer, simpler and more flexible, and works in Excel 365 and Google Sheets. Learn VLOOKUP too, because you’ll see it in older files and some workplaces.
- What should I learn first for an internship?
- SUM/AVERAGE, absolute references ($), IF, XLOOKUP, sorting and filtering, pivot tables and clean charts. That covers most entry-level tasks.
- Is the course free?
- Yes, with no sign-up.