Business Metrics with Spreadsheets

Discover what data is, where it shows up in everyday life, and why understanding it can help you make smarter decisions across any industry.

Interpret tabular data by identifying what’s being measured, understanding how it’s organized, and recognizing the role of metadata in adding context.

Distinguish between different data types—like numerical vs. categorical—and apply the right reasoning based on how the data is structured and measured.

Summarize datasets using frequencies, measures of center and spread, and descriptive statistics like five-number summaries and tables.

Explore how values relate using ratios, proportions, and correlations to compare parts and measure connections between variables.

Wrap up your introduction to data by reviewing key takeaways about structure, types, summaries, and relationships—building confidence for your next steps in analysis.

Get introduced to five major categories of business metrics and explore how companies measure progress toward common goals like growth, efficiency, and innovation.

Discover how KPIs track business goals and support strategic decisions through clear, measurable indicators across different departments.

Explore common growth metrics like revenue growth rate, market share, and active users—and learn how to calculate, interpret, and apply them to track business expansion.

Explore how time, cost, and resource-based metrics help evaluate and improve a company’s operational efficiency.

Understand how gross margin, net earnings, EBITDA, and CLV reveal how well a business turns revenue into profit.

Evaluate customer happiness and loyalty using metrics like CSAT, churn rate, and repeat purchase rate.

Track how a business develops and adopts new ideas using metrics like product output, adoption rates, and R&D investment.

Learn how to read and interpret the income statement, cash flow statement, and balance sheet to assess a company’s profitability, liquidity, and overall financial health.

Wrap up your understanding of business metrics with a recap of KPI categories, goal types, and the financial statements that help companies track performance across the board.

Get introduced to the history and power of spreadsheets, explore their core features, and see why they’re essential tools for data analysis—no matter which application you choose to use.

Get comfortable navigating spreadsheet interfaces, using menus, toolbars, and shortcuts to organize data and perform key operations efficiently.

Master the use of cell references in spreadsheets, including relative vs. absolute references and named ranges, to write clearer formulas and manage data across sheets.

Perform essential spreadsheet operations like sorting, filtering, copying, and deleting to keep your data clean, organized, and ready for analysis or presentation.

Wrap up your introduction to spreadsheets by reinforcing key concepts like cells, rows, and columns—plus gain confidence in building, editing, and saving your own spreadsheets.

Get oriented to the process of analyzing data in spreadsheets, from cleaning messy inputs to asking meaningful questions that turn raw information into actionable insight.

Build and troubleshoot formulas that calculate values, manipulate text, and combine cell references to clean and analyze spreadsheet data.

Apply logic and condition-based calculations using functions like IF, AND, and COUNTIFS to filter, aggregate, and clean spreadsheet data based on custom rules.

Work with dates and clean tabular data using spreadsheet tools for extraction, validation, deduplication, and text splitting to prepare datasets for analysis.

Retrieve reference data and summarize large datasets using lookup functions and pivot tables for efficient spreadsheet analysis.

Wrap up your journey through spreadsheet data analysis by reviewing key techniques for cleaning, transforming, and querying data—all in service of answering real-world questions.

Explore how charts can bring your data to life. This overview sets the stage for creating pie charts, bar charts, line graphs, and more—so you can spot trends and communicate clearly.

Understand when pie charts work best for showing part-to-whole comparisons and recognize common pitfalls that make them less effective.

Create and format pie charts in spreadsheets to highlight how categories contribute to a whole, adjusting labels, formatting, and layout for clear and accurate presentation.

Interpret and choose between bar and column charts to compare categorical data, understanding when to use grouped or stacked formats to highlight relationships and category differences.

Create and customize bar and column charts in spreadsheets to compare categories, format axes and labels for clarity, and display grouped or stacked layouts for multi-dimensional data.

Understand how line and area charts reveal trends over time, compare categories, and represent parts of a whole, while recognizing when these chart types are appropriate or potentially misleading.

Create and customize line and area charts in spreadsheets to visualize trends, compare series, and highlight data patterns with clear formatting and multiple data series.

Interpret scatter plots to explore relationships between two numerical variables, assess correlation strength and direction, and spot clusters, trends, or outliers.

Create and customize scatter plots in spreadsheets to reveal patterns, spot outliers, and explore potential correlations between two numerical variables.

Learn how values are distributed across ranges, estimate variability, and spot outliers using histograms to interpret the shape and spread of numerical data.

Create and customize histogram charts in spreadsheets to visualize how numerical data is distributed, spot frequency patterns, and identify variability or outliers.

Choose the right chart type for your data and refine its design to clearly communicate trends, comparisons, and distributions to your audience.

Wrap up your charting journey by reinforcing key takeaways—from choosing the right chart type to formatting it for clarity and impact—all using spreadsheet tools.