Short course
Complete Excel training
Excel is still, today, the most universally used tool in organisations, whether an international NGO, an SME, an accounting department, a public administration or a development project. Yet the vast majority of users exploit only a tiny fraction of its real capabilities. They enter data, add up a few columns, apply bold, and stop there. The rest of its potential, the part that saves entire days of work, remains unknown.
- Duration
- 32 hours over 4 weeks
- Format
- In person or online
- Credential
- Training certificate
Tuition90,000 XOF
01
By the end of the programme, you will be able to
- Master the Excel working environment and organise a data workbook properly
- Build reliable formulas and understand relative, absolute and mixed references
- Use the essential calculation, text, date and conditional logic functions
- Format professional tables that are readable and meet presentation standards
- Sort, filter, consolidate and combine data from several sources
- Design pivot tables and charts suited to the message to convey
- Automate information lookup with VLOOKUP, XLOOKUP, INDEX and MATCH
- Clean and secure a database with validation, conditional formatting and Power Query
- Build a complete dynamic dashboard from a raw database
- Protect, share and document a file intended for use by several people
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Who it is for
Target audience
The course is for anyone who handles data or figures in their professional or academic work. It was designed in particular for the following profiles:
- Monitoring and evaluation and MEAL officers: Processing collected data, indicator dashboards, periodic reports
- Accountants, managers, administrative assistants: Budget monitoring, reconciliation statements, automated expense tables
- Project officers and coordinators: Planning, activity monitoring, budgets and donor reporting
- Sales staff and stock managers: Sales tracking, inventories, margins and automatic alerts
- Students and recent graduates: A distinctive skill on the job market, processing dissertation data
- Entrepreneurs and managers of small organisations: Running the business without costly management software
- Teaching and administrative staff: Managing grades, enrolment, timetables and school statistics
Prerequisites
No prior knowledge of Excel is required. Participants simply need to:
- Be able to use a computer in daily life (switch it on, open a file, move between windows)
- Have a laptop for in-person sessions, or a computer with an internet connection for online sessions
- Have Microsoft Excel installed, preferably version 2016 or later, with Microsoft 365 recommended for the most recent functions
03
Detailed program
12 sessions · 32 h of teaching
Week 1 — Basic level: the foundations
3 sessions · 8 h- The real role of a spreadsheet, what Excel can do and what should not be asked of it
- Launching Excel, understanding the start screen, creating a new blank workbook
- The anatomy of the window: ribbon, tabs, groups, dialog box launchers
- The Quick Access Toolbar and customising it
- The formula bar, the Name Box, the status bar and its calculation indicators
- Workbook, worksheet, row, column, cell, range: the essential vocabulary
- A cell's address and the column-row logic
- Moving around efficiently: arrow keys
- Managing sheets: inserting, renaming, moving, duplicating, colouring the tab, deleting, hiding
- Entering text, numbers and dates, and understanding the logic
- Editing, correcting and clearing a cell's content (F2, Delete, Backspace)
- Undoing and redoing an action
- Saving a workbook: the .xlsx, .xls, .csv and .pdf formats, and when to use each
- Opening, closing, finding a recent file, turning on AutoSave
- The fill handle: copying a value, incrementing a series of numbers, dates, days and months
- Creating a reusable custom list
- Flash Fill and automatic pattern recognition
- Copy, cut, paste; Paste Special (values, formats, formulas, transpose)
- Inserting and deleting rows, columns and cells
- Adjusting column width and row height, AutoFit
- Hiding and unhiding rows and columns
- Fonts, sizes, colours, bold, italic, underline
- Borders: outlines, gridlines, custom borders, and the principle of restraint
- Fill colours and the reasoned use of colour in a table
- Horizontal and vertical alignment, wrap text, text orientation
- Merging cells and why it should be avoided as much as possible
- Number formats: general, number, currency (FCFA), accounting, percentage, fraction, scientific
- Date and time formats, and the logic of date serial numbers
- Creating a simple custom format (thousands separator, attached unit, negative values in red)
- Copying formatting with the Format Painter
- Built-in cell styles and creating an in-house style
- Clear: all, contents, formats, comments
- Guided exercise: build a presentable monthly expense tracking sheet from scratch
- What a formula is: the equals sign, operands, operators
- Arithmetic operators (+, -, *, /, ^) and the order of calculation
- The role of parentheses in a complex formula
- Writing a formula by clicking on cells rather than typing addresses
- Copying a formula down and to the right
- Relative references: why the formula adapts when copied
- Absolute references with the dollar sign and the F4 key
- Mixed references and the classic case of the multiplication table
- Referring to a cell on another sheet in the same workbook
- Basic statistical functions: SUM, AVERAGE, MIN, MAX, COUNT, COUNTA, COUNTBLANK
- AutoSum and its shortcuts
- Rounding functions: ROUND, ROUNDUP, ROUNDDOWN, INT
- The IF function and building a simple logical test
- Comparison operators (=, <, >, <=, >=, <>)
- Combining IF with AND and OR for a test with several conditions
- Conditional counting functions: COUNTIF and COUNTIFS
- Conditional sum functions: SUMIF and SUMIFS
- Understanding and correcting error messages: #DIV/0!, #VALUE!, #NAME?, #REF!, #N/A, ####
- Page layout and printing: orientation, margins, print area, repeated titles, header and footer, print preview, export to PDF
- Guided exercise: automatically calculate a report card with grades assigned by formula
Week 2 — Intermediate level: using and analysing data
3 sessions · 8 h- What distinguishes a presentation table from a real database
- The golden rules of a clean database: a single header row, one observation per row, one variable per column, no empty rows, no merged cells
- Converting a range into a structured table and the immediate benefits
- Naming a table and using structured references in formulas
- The automatic total row of a structured table
- Sorting on a column: ascending, descending, custom multi-level sort
- Sorting by colour or by a custom list
- AutoFilter: text, number and date filters
- Filtering by colour and searching in the filter pane
- The advanced filter and extracting results to another range
- Removing duplicates and identifying unique values
- Data validation: drop-down lists, number ranges, date limits, text length
- Custom input messages and error alerts
- Circling invalid data
- Freezing panes to keep headers visible
- Splitting the window and working on two distant areas of the same sheet
- Guided exercise: clean up a raw data collection file containing duplicates, merged cells and inconsistent formats
- VLOOKUP: full syntax, lookup value, table array, column index, approximate or exact match
- The three classic VLOOKUP pitfalls and how to avoid them
- Making a lookup robust with IFERROR and IFNA
- HLOOKUP and the cases where it is still useful
- XLOOKUP, the modern function that replaces the previous ones, including looking to the left
- INDEX and MATCH together, the universal lookup solution
- Two-way lookups crossing a row and a column
- Text functions: LEFT, RIGHT, MID, LEN, SEARCH, FIND
- Cleaning text with TRIM, CLEAN, UPPER, LOWER, PROPER
- Joining text with CONCAT, TEXTJOIN and the ampersand operator
- Replacing and substituting: REPLACE and SUBSTITUTE
- Converting between text and numbers: VALUE, TEXT
- Splitting a text column into several columns with Text to Columns
- Date functions: TODAY, NOW, DAY, MONTH, YEAR, DATE
- Calculating a duration, an age or length of service with DATEDIF
- Working days: NETWORKDAYS, WORKDAY, with public holidays
- EOMONTH and EDATE for payment schedules
- Guided exercise: build a beneficiary list enriched automatically from two separate files
- The principle of the pivot table and the questions it answers
- Preparing the source correctly before creating a pivot table
- Creating a first pivot table and understanding the four areas: filters, columns, rows, values
- Changing the summary function: sum, average, count, maximum, minimum
- Showing values as a percentage of the grand total, row total or column total
- Grouping dates by month, quarter and year
- Grouping numeric values into bands
- Creating a calculated field and a calculated item
- Sorting and filtering within a pivot table
- Slicers and timelines for visual filtering
- Connecting several pivot tables to the same slicer
- Refreshing a pivot table after the source changes
- Report layouts and formatting a pivot table
- Choosing the right chart for the message: column, bar, line, pie, scatter, area
- Creating, moving and resizing a chart
- Chart elements: title, axes, legend, data labels, gridlines
- Editing series, switching rows and columns
- Combination charts and the secondary axis
- Pivot charts
- In-cell sparklines
- Representation mistakes never to make: truncated axis, fifteen-slice pie chart, 3D effects
- Guided exercise: analyse an annual sales database and produce three commented charts
Week 3 — Advanced level: automating, securing and managing
3 sessions · 8 h- Conditional formatting: highlight cell rules
- Top and bottom rules
- Data bars, colour scales and icon sets
- Creating a formula-based rule, the most powerful case
- Colouring an entire row based on the value of a single column
- Automatically flagging duplicates, overdue deadlines and critical thresholds
- Managing, editing, prioritising and deleting existing rules
- Nested IF functions and their limits
- IFS and SWITCH, the readable alternatives
- Complementary logical functions: NOT, ISBLANK, ISNUMBER, ISTEXT, ISERROR
- Dynamic array functions: FILTER, SORT, SORTBY, UNIQUE, SEQUENCE
- How spilled ranges behave and the hash operator
- SUMPRODUCT and its uses for counting and weighting
- Rank and ranking functions: RANK, LARGE, SMALL
- Guided exercise: create a deadline tracking sheet that raises its own alerts
- Defined names: naming a cell, a range, a constant, and the Name Manager
- Dynamic named ranges and their use in drop-down lists
- Cascading drop-down lists that depend on a first choice
- Consolidating several sheets with the same structure
- Links between workbooks, their usefulness and their dangers
- Introduction to Power Query: what the query editor is for
- Importing from an Excel file, a CSV file, a whole folder, a web page
- Cleaning operations in Power Query: removing columns, promoting headers, changing types
- Replacing values, removing blank rows and errors
- Splitting and merging columns
- Pivoting and unpivoting columns to flatten a badly structured table
- Merging two queries, the equivalent of a database join
- Appending queries to stack several files with the same format
- Refreshing a query and automating a recurring monthly process
- What-if tools: Goal Seek, Scenario Manager, one- and two-variable data tables
- Solver for constrained optimisation problems
- Guided exercise: consolidate twelve monthly files into a single database that refreshes in one click
- What a dashboard is and what sets it apart from a simple table of figures
- Designing the mock-up before touching the keyboard: which indicators, for which decision-maker, how often
- Separating a file's three layers: raw data, intermediate calculations, output
- Building key indicators and displaying them as large, readable numbers
- Form controls: drop-down lists, checkboxes, option buttons, spin buttons
- Making a chart dynamic according to a user's choice
- Slicers and timelines as a management interface
- The Excel Camera and linked pictures to compose an output page
- Rules of visual restraint: limited palette, alignment, white space, reading hierarchy
- Hiding gridlines, row and column headers and unnecessary tabs
- Protecting formula cells while leaving input cells accessible
- Protecting a sheet, protecting the workbook structure, encrypting a file with a password
- Hiding sheets and making them very hidden
- Sharing a workbook, tracking changes, managing comments and notes
- Recorded macros: recording, running, assigning to a button
- Reading and lightly editing the generated code in the Visual Basic editor
- The .xlsm format and the security precautions related to macros
- The keyboard shortcuts that save the most time day to day
- Guided exercise: assemble a complete, filterable and protected activity monitoring dashboard
Week 4 — The complete individual project
3 sessions · 8 h- Presentation of the common-thread project dataset, a real raw database that is deliberately imperfect
- Critical reading of the database: spotting inconsistencies, duplicates, missing values, heterogeneous formats
- Defining the need: which questions the final dashboard must answer
- Writing the codebook
- Complete cleaning of the database with the tools seen in weeks 2 and 3
- Setting up data validation to prevent errors from being reintroduced
- Individual work at the computer, with the trainer visiting each participant
- Group checkpoint at the end of the session
- Building the pivot tables that answer the questions asked
- Enriching the database with a lookup from a second file
- Calculating key indicators and their changes
- Producing charts and justifying the choice of representation
- Assembling the dashboard: layout, slicers, indicators, charts
- Protecting the file and preparing the version for distribution
- Three-minute oral presentation by each participant in front of the group
- Critical and constructive feedback from the trainer and peers on each piece of work
04
Assessment and certification
Any participant who obtains a final mark of at least 12 out of 20 receives a training certificate issued by Waaldé Impact, signed by the trainer and the head of the organisation. The certificate states the course title, the 32-hour duration, the dates and the skills validated, without any grade or ranking. Each certificate carries a unique number and a verification code allowing an employer to confirm its authenticity with Waaldé Impact.
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Upcoming sessions
Next dates being prepared
Leave your email: we will let you know as soon as registration opens.
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Frequently asked questions
90,000 XOF per participant. Training for a team or an organisation is quoted on request.
32 hours over 4 weeks.
Yes: you can attend onsite or online, as you prefer.
No prior knowledge of Excel is required. Participants simply need to: be able to use a computer in daily life (switch it on, open a file, move between windows) ; have a laptop for in-person sessions, or a computer with an internet connection for online sessions ; have Microsoft Excel installed, preferably version 2016 or later, with Microsoft 365 recommended for the most recent functions.
Yes: participants who meet the completion requirements receive a Waaldé Impact certificate with a unique number that employers can verify online.
Fill in the online enrolment request: no payment is taken on the site. The firm reviews your application, then contacts you to confirm your place and the payment terms. No session is scheduled yet: leave your email on this page to be told when registration opens.
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Cohorts are deliberately small to guarantee genuine individual support. Reserve your place or ask us your questions.