one of the easiest places to start if you want to build analytic skills is Excel it's readily available widely used the learning curve isn't hard and there are a lot of online resources that can help you learn Excel let's look at the top skills you should learn in Excel for data analysis hi I'm Jen whether you're a business analyst a data scientist or you just want to understand your data a little bit better Excel is a great place to start we'll go through the top five data analysis Excel skills that anybody that wants to do analytics in Excel should take time to learn first learn the basics the simplest thing you can do to understand your data better is learn how to filter and sort to freeze your panes and reorder your data in ways that make it easier to understand this sounds super basic but is really foundational to the rest of the analysis that you might perform with more detailed skills once you've got the basics down move on to functions there are hundreds of different functions you could learn so what's a good starting point there's a few key functions I find really helpful for analyzing data if statements can be very complex and powerful depending on how you implement or they can be simple but they can definitely be helpful know how to use the sum if and some if functions as well as count if and count ifs again we're talking about basic statistics that you can do on your data and these functions really come in handy similar to that you should know how to use vlookup or if you want to take it a step further index-match is great to know how to use Microsoft just released an additional function called X lookup which i think is only a matter of time before it passes vlookup and index match in popularity and in functional benefit related to excel functions know how to make absolute and relative references on your data absolute references being it always references a fixed cell that's indicated by dollar signs that you see in front of either the column or row or both relative references change depending on where you move the formula third know how to use pivot tables anytime you're working with raw or clean data that has a lot of commonality in it or some commonality and it pivots Able's are a quick way to get an overall snapshot of your data and start to understand it more turn on and use and learn the data analysis toolpak the data analysis toolpak offers a variety of options that help you perform basic statistics on your data as well as starting to analyze and understand variances you have within your data lastly learn how to use charts and graphs also known as data visualization this is such a popular skill for people to have and is increasingly being recognized as a critical skill for people that are doing analytics work it helps you explain clearly what you're finding as a result of your analysis which can lead to easier decision making and clear interpretation of the results of the analysis work that you've done your focus here should be on graphs that are easy to understand and interpret for someone reading them don't worry about the donut graphs and the 3d graphs for now focus on the bar and column graphs and charts to start out and then moved into stacked and stacked and clustered bar and column charts or if you're looking at profit and loss in a business look at waterfall charts these are the items that are likely to add the most value and while they may not be the flashiest type of visualization to do reality is that they're going to be the most easy to understand what should be the goal of any data visualization that you do those are my top five data analysis skills in Excel but I think anyone working with data should know and understand how to use if you want to dive into doing more statistics work I'll link to a series I did on basic statistics to help anyone learn those skills which will come in handy as you dig into more data analysis work thank you so much for watching