Webbo3 Data Analytics · Cohort 2 · Excel Track · Start Here

Start Here: How the Excel Track Works

Five weeks, twenty classes, two datasets and one pod project. Read this once before Week 1 and you will always know where you are and what comes next.

This track teaches you to take a messy spreadsheet and turn it into a decision. Not to memorise buttons: to look at a business's data, see what is wrong with it, fix it, ask it questions and show the answer on one page that a manager can act on.

Everything here was built for beginners. If you have never written a formula, you are in the right place. If you have, Week 1 will still change how you think about the formulas you already know.

1. How This Track Is Organised

Live Classes and Virtual Classes

A live class is taught by your tutor in real time. You watch, you follow along on your own laptop, and you ask questions while the idea is fresh. Each live class has a lesson page here, so you can read it before class to prepare, or after class to go over what you missed.

A virtual class is your independent practice time. Nobody is teaching; you are doing. The lesson page tells you exactly what to build, step by step, and shows you what your screen should look like when you are right. Virtual classes are where the learning sticks, so do not skip them.

2. The Five Weeks at a Glance

Notice the rhythm. A live class introduces an idea. The virtual class after it makes you use that idea on your own. The last virtual class of each week moves the same skill onto your pod project. By the time you touch Verdant Foods, you have already done the same thing twice on TechPlug.

3. Dataset 1: The TechPlug Sales Workbook

TechPlug sells electronics from 10 branches across Nigeria: Lagos Island, Lagos Mainland, Ibadan, Kano, Kaduna, Enugu, Abuja, Port Harcourt, Warri and Jos. Its workbook records 1,070 sales from 1 January to 31 March 2024, one row per sale. You will open it in Week 1, clean it in Week 2, question it in Week 3, look things up and summarise it in Week 4, and present it in Week 5.

The workbook has four tabs:

The Sales Data sheet has twelve columns:

The Sales Data sheet is not perfect, on purpose. Real data never is. Finding what is wrong with it is your Week 1 virtual class, so we will not spoil it here.

Save the files in one folder you can find again, for example Documents > Webbo3 Excel Track. Keep the downloaded workbook untouched as your original, and work on a copy.

4. Dataset 2: Verdant Foods Nigeria (Your Pod Project)

Verdant Foods Nigeria makes packaged food: drinks, snacks, cereals and condiments sold across five regions. Its file has 470 rows and ten columns, and it has four kinds of problems baked in deliberately: duplicate rows, blank quantities, inconsistent category names and dates in the wrong format.

Your tutor sends it at the start of Week 2, before your first class that week, and the Week 2 pod task page has the download link. With your pod, you will:

Why a second dataset? Because following your tutor on TechPlug proves you can follow. Doing the same work on a file nobody has cleaned for you proves you can do it. That second thing is what an employer is paying for.

5. Setting Up Excel

Which Excel Do You Have?

Open Excel, then File > Account and look under Product Information. Every function in this track works in Microsoft 365, Excel 2021 and Excel 2024. Two of them are newer than some laptops:

On a Mac

Everything works the same. Where a lesson says Ctrl, press Cmd. The ribbon tabs have the same names, though a few buttons sit in slightly different places; when in doubt, use the search box at the top of the Excel window and type the name of the button.

6. How to Read the Lessons

There is no programming in this track, so you will not see code editors. Every example is drawn as the part of Excel you are looking at. Before each one, a strip tells you what the example is for. Here is one from Week 3, so you know how to read it:

Every value in every pane is real. The formula was typed into a workbook holding the actual course file and calculated by a spreadsheet engine; nothing was typed in by hand. So if your Excel shows a different number, the difference is a clue: a range that stops too early, a cell that is not cleaned, a typo in the formula. The lesson is telling you what correct looks like.

A click path is a list of things to click, in order. Each numbered line is one action. Ribbon tabs (Home, Insert, Data) come first, then the button on that tab.

7. All 22 Topics and Where They Are Taught

Week 5 has no new topics. It is for making your dashboard better, giving and receiving feedback, reviewing all 22 topics and submitting your project.

8. How Your Pod Works on the Project

• Your pod keeps one shared workbook for Verdant Foods, in the shared folder your tutor gives you. Everyone works in the same file, so everyone can see what has been done.
• The workbook grows by one tab each week: Raw Data and Cleaning Log and Cleaned Data in Week 2, Analysis in Week 3, Dashboard in Week 4.
• The Raw Data tab is never edited. Ever. If something goes wrong, it is how you start again.
• Every change to the data is written in the Cleaning Log: what, which column, how many rows, how. An analyst who cannot say what they changed cannot be trusted with the result.
• Agree in your pod who does which part each week, but make sure every member can explain every tab. Your tutor may ask any of you.

Before Week 1

Next, Week 1, Live 1: what data analysis actually is, the four kinds of question it answers, and the five-step workflow every analyst follows, before we open Excel at all.