Learn Excel with AI
Opening a blank workbook and not knowing where to start is where almost everyone begins. Excel has more than 480 functions; you will use about fifteen day to day. On Studio Cortex, AI generates an Excel course calibrated to what you actually need to do — a clean quote, a cash-flow tracker, an invoice, a PivotTable — not a catalogue of functions you will never open.
Why learn Excel in 2026?
The most requested skill on the job market
Excel appears in a huge share of office job listings across every sector. "Proficiency in Excel" is on almost every administrative, sales or finance job description. It is not a decorative line: interviewers often test whether you can build a PivotTable or write a VLOOKUP on the spot. Being able to do it sets you apart immediately from a candidate who ticks the box without ever proving it.
Run a small business without expensive software
Before paying for a dedicated management tool, Excel does 90% of the work: quotes, payment tracking, VAT schedules, margin calculations, a 12-month cash-flow plan. A freelancer who keeps a clean income sheet avoids nasty surprises at tax time and knows, month by month, exactly where their revenue stands.
Save hours every week
The gap between someone who knows Excel and someone who does not is measured in hours. Copying a formula down instead of typing 200 rows by hand, replacing a manual filter with a PivotTable, adding a total with Alt + =: these reflexes turn an afternoon of data entry into five minutes. Over a year, the time saved is considerable.
The gateway to data and analysis
Excel is the best first step before Power BI, SQL or Python. The ideas you learn here — rows/columns, filters, functions, tables — are exactly the ones you meet everywhere afterwards. Understanding a PivotTable already means understanding the "group by" of a database. No maths prerequisite: if you can add numbers, you have the level.
What you will learn
The interface and entering data without getting lost
The ribbon, the tabs, the formula bar, the difference between a cell, a range and a workbook. You will learn to enter data cleanly (numbers, dates, text), to use the fill handle (drag to generate 1, 2, 3… or the months of the year), and to lock a reference with the dollar sign ($A$1) so it does not move when you stretch a formula. That one detail prevents 80% of beginner mistakes.
Essential formulas: SUM, AVERAGE, IF
We start with the must-haves: SUM to add up, AVERAGE, MIN, MAX, COUNT. Then the IF function, which introduces conditional logic: "if the amount is over £1,000, show ‘follow up’, otherwise ‘OK’". Next come SUMIF and COUNTIF to add or count against a criterion (the total sales for March only, for example). These four functions cover most of what an office job asks for.
VLOOKUP and XLOOKUP
The function that changes everything: automatically finding information in a table. VLOOKUP pulls a price from a catalogue using a product reference. Its limit: it only looks to the right and breaks the moment you insert a column. That is why Microsoft introduced XLOOKUP in 2019/365: more flexible, it searches in any direction and handles missing values cleanly. You will learn both and know when to use which.
PivotTables
The PivotTable is Excel’s most impressive and most misunderstood tool. In three clicks it summarizes thousands of rows: revenue by client, by month, by product… without writing a single formula. You will start from a raw sales list and build a summary table you can rearrange by dragging fields. It is the skill that impresses most in interviews and saves the most time at work.
Charts and conditional formatting
A table is good; a chart that tells the story is better. You will learn to pick the right type (column to compare, line for a trend, pie for a split) and to avoid clutter. Conditional formatting colours cells automatically according to a rule: overdue invoices in red, thin margins in orange. A dashboard then reads at a glance.
Data cleaning and an introduction to macros
Real data is messy: duplicates, extra spaces, wrong date formats, inconsistent capitalization. You will see TRIM, UPPER/LOWER, LEFT/RIGHT, CONCAT, plus "Remove Duplicates" and Power Query to import and transform a recurring file. Finally, a gentle introduction to macros and the recorder: automating a repetitive task without knowing how to program.
How it works
Tell us where you are
Never written a formula? You can do sums but PivotTables scare you? You already run a small business and want to automate your tracking? The AI sets the course to your real starting point. No "opening Excel" chapter if you already know it, no leaps into the void if you are a complete beginner.
The AI builds your path
In a few seconds, our AI (powered by Claude from Anthropic) generates a structured course with worked examples drawn from your context. Each lesson gives the exact formula and explains it in one sentence, then lets you practise on a case that resembles your own work.
Practise, test yourself, repeat
You move at your own pace, with concrete exercises and quizzes that spot your weak points. Stuck on absolute references? The AI tutor rephrases and hands you a targeted exercise, available 24/7. Your first course is free; subscriptions start at €12.99/month if you want to create more.
Example prompts
Here's what you could ask Studio Cortex to learn excel :
“Excel for a freelancer: build my income tracker”
→ A course that builds, step by step, an income sheet: date, client, service, amount and payment method columns, with an automatic monthly SUM and a visual cue as your revenue grows. You leave with the method file, not just the theory.
“Understand VLOOKUP with a product catalogue example”
→ A lesson starting from a 30-item catalogue and a quote sheet, showing how VLOOKUP fetches the price automatically, explaining the four arguments one by one, then doing the same with XLOOKUP to show why it is more robust.
“Create my first PivotTable step by step”
→ An interactive guide that starts from a list of 500 fictional sales and has you build a PivotTable: revenue by client, then by month, then client × month. With the classic traps to avoid (non-contiguous data, merged cells, missing headers).
“Clean a customer file full of duplicates and spaces”
→ A practical course on TRIM, UPPER, "Remove Duplicates" and Power Query, applied to a messy CSV export. Goal: turn an unusable list into a clean base ready for a mail merge or a PivotTable.