What Excel Prep course do you recommend?

Question

I am beginning an internship in consulting and wanted to take a course in excel beforehand to prepare. I have heard that Train the Streets is great, but I was looking for something more economical. I spotted some courses on Udemy, but don't know which to pick. Do you have any specific courses you could recommend?

Answer 1

Have a look at this thread: https://www.preplounge.com/en/consulting-forum/excel-skills-9465

Answer 2

I liked Wall Street Prep, Break Into Wall Street, Udemy, Coursera. There are a lot of good ones - make sure not to overdo Excel since it would be more beneficial for you to be proficient in

MS Outlook including EFFICIENT use of calendar - look on Youtube for Outlook pro usersMS One Note - forget paper based Todo lists - that is the way to go

You would not believe how many people have messy calendars, cannot send proper meeting invites, dont know how to properly sort inbox and have no proper folder structure. This is the tool that will be open 24/7 on your laptop and the piece of software you use the most.

MS PPT - make sure you are proficient with how to use PPT in its basic form although all firms have special customized software within PPT so save you time

Answer 3

Hi, I appreciate Udemy and Coursera's proposals.

Best,
Antonello

Answer 4

Hi there,

This is great that you're preparing for this role ahead of time! Just remember, you do not need to be an absolutel whiz before you start. Most courses will do the trick, so just pick whichever one seems to suit your learning style best.

Here are a few to start you off:

A few good resources:

https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/learn-excel-resources

https://www.udemy.com/share/101Wde/ (Udemy is excellent. $15...basically free)

Important Tip: Don't just learn formulas etc. Test yourself! Download a free data set, ask yourself a question, and try to solve for it. Play with actual data solving real questions and building a real dashboard etc. Don't just passively take lessons :)

Answer 5

Hello!

Congrats of that offer!

If there is one thing I wish I had done before joining McKinsey, that would have been Excel. So great that you are thinking about this now, since it can really be a game changer, so I would really focus on that (more than pptx, industry knowledge, etc., that are nice-to-have, but not deal breakers).

Train the Street is great, but get any that makes you familiar with:

Basic operations: SUM, SUMPRODUCT

Text transformations: CONCATENATE, LEFT, RIGHT, & operator,

Connecting different datasets: VLOOKUP, HLOOKUP, INDEX(MATCH(),MATCH())

Conditional-based operations: SUMIF, COUNTIF, SUMIFS, COUNTIFS, COUNTA

Learn how to analyze data using Pivot Tables

There are plenty of online materials:

Microsoft Support: https://support.office.com/en-us/excel

Kubicle: https://kubicle.com/personal (go for the 7 days free trial - Excel for Business Analytics)

Hope it helps!

Cheers,

Clara