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The Complete Excel Course with AI Integration

Excel course for paralegals and legal teams

Keeping Excel indexes, trackers and chronologies is part of the work for paralegals, legal secretaries and legal support teams. This guide selects the material in The Complete Excel Course with AI Integration for clean lists you can sort, dates and working days, matter and deadline tracking, time and expense totals, lookups between sheets and caseload PivotTables.

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Taught by Sagnik Bhattacharya and Virginia Thorn

The Complete Excel Course with AI Integration: Sagnik Bhattacharya and Virginia Thorn

What you will be able to do

At work, you will be able to:

  • Track key dates and deadlines for each matter, select its status from a drop-down list and highlight overdue entries.
  • Calculate the working days remaining until a deadline using date arithmetic and the TODAY, EOMONTH and NETWORKDAYS functions.
  • Organise document and exhibit indexes into Excel Tables, freeze their headers, and sort, filter and print the lists.
  • Prepare time and expense totals for billing by using SUMIFS to group them by matter and month.
  • Arrange chronology events by date using SORT, then use FILTER to show entries concerning a particular person or issue.
  • Report on caseloads with PivotTables and slicers, grouping matters by type, court or fee earner.

Projects

What you will build.

The course has 14 projects. These four matter most here.

  • Task tracker in Excel (TaskFlow): start and due dates, status, priority and a progress bar for each task, with working days left, days past due and unfinished high-priority tasks highlighted.

    Project 07

    TaskFlow

    One sheet that shows what is done, what is late and what is urgent.

    Apply the tracker to matters: choose status and priority from drop-down lists, mark overdue steps with colour, place key dates on a timeline and calculate working days remaining before deadlines.

  • Excel PivotTables and a PivotChart of sales data (SalesPlusPerformance): net sales by product category as a column chart, with State, Region and City filters.

    Project 05

    SalesPlusPerformance

    A sales question answered in seconds, straight from the order data.

    Use a few clicks to count matters by type, court or fee earner, total hours by matter and month, and provide slicers for each team.

  • XLOOKUP formula in Excel (PeopleInsight): each employee row looks up its location from another sheet.

    Project 06

    PeopleInsight HR workbook

    Employee data joined across sheets with one formula.

    Use a client or matter number to retrieve its name from another sheet, and extract portions of matter codes with LEFT, RIGHT and MID.

  • Project 02

    Dunder Michael Paper Company employee database

    Practise cleaning, sorting and filtering an employee list, then apply those steps to a document or exhibit index, freezing its header row and setting up the bundle's print layout.

Lessons

The lessons that matter, in course order.

The Complete Excel Course with AI Integration has 186 lessons. This page picks out 44 of them, 3 h 41 min of video. Each lesson keeps its number in the course.

Where to start

Lesson 19 Excel tables

If you already maintain Excel lists, start at Lesson 19 to give your indexes and trackers a clean table as their foundation. The whole Managing data in Excel section is included here and is available free by email with its practice files, on request through the course page. For a first introduction to Excel, start at Lesson 1. If you already use tables for your lists, begin the tracker at Lesson 79.

Get the free section by email

44 of 186 lessons · 3 h 41 min

03 Managing data in Excel: sort, filter and tables (Dunder Michael Paper employee database) 9 lessons · 1 h 1 min Work through an employee database to learn how to organise indexes and lists. Create Excel Tables, apply filters and multi-level sorts, clean names and references, remove duplicate rows and split columns. Freeze the header row and prepare printing with a defined print area and page layout.
  1. 19 Start here Excel tables Create and format a table, structured references and total row 8 min
  2. 20 Sorting data in Excel Single and multi-level sort on an employee database 6 min
  3. 21 Filtering data in Excel AutoFilter, text and number filters on employee data 10 min
  4. 22 Cleaning data in Excel TRIM, Paste Special values and Find and Replace 13 min
  5. 23 Remove duplicates in Excel Find and delete duplicate rows in an employee list 6 min
  6. 24 Flash Fill in Excel Split first and last names automatically 3 min
  7. 25 Text to Columns in Excel Split data by delimiter into separate columns 6 min
  8. 26 Freeze panes in Excel Lock header rows and columns while scrolling 3 min
  9. 27 Printing in Excel Print area, page orientation, scaling and page layout 6 min
04 Essential formulas and functions (IF, SUMIF and more) 4 of 13 lessons · 25 min Calculate days until a deadline with TODAY and date arithmetic, and find functions through the function library. Use SUMIF and SUMIFS to total time and expenses by matter and month, and COUNTIF and COUNTIFS to count matters by type.
  1. 36 SUMIF and COUNTIF in Excel Conditional sum and count with one criterion 8 min
  2. 37 SUMIFS and COUNTIFS in Excel Sum and count with multiple criteria 7 min
  3. 38 The Excel function library Insert Function dialog and Formula AutoComplete 5 min
  4. 39 Date and time functions in Excel TODAY, NOW, MONTH and date arithmetic 6 min
07 PivotTables and PivotCharts: data analysis made easy 10 lessons · 33 min Sales orders provide the practice data for PivotTables, slicers and PivotCharts. Apply these methods to summarise caseloads and recorded time by matter type, court, fee earner or month.
  1. 57 PivotTables 101 in Excel What a PivotTable does and the sales dataset 5 min
  2. 58 Preparing data for PivotTables Clean data with TRIM, PROPER, find and replace 5 min
  3. 59 Create your first PivotTable in Excel Insert a PivotTable from a sales table 1 min
  4. 60 PivotTable fields in Excel Rows, values, columns and Value Field Settings 2 min
  5. 61 PivotTable summaries in Excel Sales by product category and grouping by date 4 min
  6. 62 Slicers in Excel Filter PivotTables with clickable buttons 3 min
  7. 63 PivotCharts in Excel Create interactive charts from a PivotTable 5 min
  8. 64 PivotTable design Tab Report layouts, PivotTable styles and number formats 5 min
  9. 65 Refresh a PivotTable in Excel Update pivots when source data changes 2 min
  10. 66 Excel Ninja Challenge PivotTable sales by region, category and monthly trend 1 min
08 Advanced Excel functions: lookups, text and arrays 12 lessons · 54 min Build chronologies and lists that update themselves with UNIQUE, FILTER, SORT and SORTBY, and calculate dates with TODAY, EOMONTH and NETWORKDAYS. Retrieve client or matter names from another sheet using XLOOKUP, VLOOKUP or INDEX and MATCH, and separate matter-code components with LEFT, RIGHT and MID.
  1. 67 Lookup functions in Excel The PeopleInsight HR dataset and why lookups matter 2 min
  2. 68 VLOOKUP in Excel Find employee data across sheets with exact match 4 min
  3. 69 XLOOKUP in Excel Exact match, if not found and two-way lookup 6 min
  4. 70 IFERROR in Excel Handle lookup errors in VLOOKUP and XLOOKUP formulas 3 min
  5. 71 INDEX and MATCH in Excel A flexible alternative to VLOOKUP 6 min
  6. 72 CONCAT and TEXTJOIN in Excel Combine employee names and text with a delimiter 3 min
  7. 73 LEFT, RIGHT and MID in Excel Extract parts of a text code like DAL-SAL-0001 7 min
  8. 74 TODAY, EOMONTH and NETWORKDAYS in Excel Date calculations for HR data 5 min
  9. 75 UNIQUE function in Excel Extract a distinct list with dynamic arrays 6 min
  10. 76 FILTER function in Excel Dynamic array filtering with AND and OR criteria 5 min
  11. 77 SORT and SORTBY in Excel Sort data dynamically with formulas 4 min
  12. 78 Excel Ninja Challenge XLOOKUP, totals and text concatenation lookup challenge 3 min
09 Project: task automation with data validation and forms 9 lessons · 49 min Adapt the TaskFlow tracker to a matter list, with a Gantt-style timeline and NETWORKDAYS and TODAY calculations for days remaining before deadlines. Add status and priority drop-down lists, highlight completed and overdue steps, and protect the sheet from accidental edits.
  1. 79 TaskFlow project tracker in Excel Overview of the task tracker dashboard 4 min
  2. 80 Designing a task tracker in Excel TaskFlow layout, columns and headers 5 min
  3. 81 Data validation in Excel Status and priority drop-down lists in TaskFlow 8 min
  4. 82 Conditional formatting in Excel Highlight overdue and completed tasks 8 min
  5. 83 Gantt chart in Excel Build a project timeline with conditional formatting 6 min
  6. 84 Data bars and icon sets in Excel Visual priority and progress in TaskFlow 6 min
  7. 85 NETWORKDAYS and TODAY in Excel Days remaining and task deadlines in TaskFlow 5 min
  8. 86 Protect a sheet and lock cells in Excel Secure the TaskFlow tracker workbook 4 min
  9. 87 Testing an Excel task tracker Stress test TaskFlow with sample data 3 min

Instructors

Who teaches it.

Virginia Thorn smiling at the camera, dark hair tied back, wearing a navy top.

Instructor, Excel with AI

Virginia Thorn

Emmy Award winner. Teaches Excel with AI at Coding Liquids.

Questions

Asked before starting.

Which Excel course covers the spreadsheet work paralegals do?

The Complete Excel Course with AI Integration from Coding Liquids covers Excel skills used in legal support: tables for document and exhibit indexes, matter and deadline tracking, NETWORKDAYS for working days, SORT and FILTER for chronologies, SUMIFS for time totals and PivotTables for caseload reports. This guide selects 44 lessons, taking 3 hours 41 minutes from the course's 16 hours.

Can a legal team use Excel to work out court and limitation deadlines?

The date calculations taught in The Complete Excel Course with AI Integration can support that work: add days to a date, use TODAY to return the current date, find month ends with EOMONTH and calculate working days with NETWORKDAYS. Which days count depends on legal rules, including court holidays and service rules. The course does not teach those rules, and each deadline must still be checked against them.

Will paralegals learn legal practice management software on this course?

No. The teaching in The Complete Excel Course with AI Integration is limited to Excel. It does not cover law, court rules for calculating deadlines, practice management software or e-discovery software. Its relevance is to legal work already handled in spreadsheets, including matter lists, indexes, chronologies and time and expense totals.

Can paralegals create an event chronology in Excel?

Yes. Use the methods taught in The Complete Excel Course with AI Integration to record events as rows in an Excel Table, with a date and source for each. Sort the rows by date and filter them by person or issue. SORT and FILTER formulas can also produce a version that rearranges itself as events are added. Employee and sales data are used to practise these methods in the lessons.

Excel with AI

See the whole course.

The Complete Excel Course with AI Integration: 16 hours of video in 186 lessons, built around 14 projects, with lifetime access, a Certificate of Completion and a 14-day money-back guarantee.

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