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The Complete Excel Course with AI Integration

Excel course for startup founders

For startup founders who keep the company's numbers in Excel before there is a finance team. This page picks out the parts of The Complete Excel Course with AI Integration that serve that: SUMIFS for revenue and costs by month, FinanceGuard for spending against budget, MarketPulse for a KPI dashboard, Power Query for exports from several tools, and the AI section with its checks. Investor models and cap tables are not taught.

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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:

  • Total revenue and costs by month with SUMIFS and set them side by side to see the monthly burn.
  • Compare spending with the budget each month with variance and percent variance, colour an overspend, and show it on a dashboard with KPI cards.
  • Keep a sales pipeline with deal values by stage from SUMIFS and COUNTIFS, and show it as a funnel chart.
  • Build a KPI dashboard for the team or for investors with KPI cards, slicers and a timeline, including conversion rate and return on investment.
  • Combine exports from several tools with Power Query: clean them, merge them on a shared ID, append each new month and unpivot a sheet with months across the top.
  • Analyse your data with Copilot, ChatGPT or Claude, and check each answer against a QA checklist.

Projects

What you will build.

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

  • Budget vs actual dashboard in Excel (FinanceGuard): total budget, actuals and variance cards above a monthly line chart and a column chart by department.

    Project 09

    FinanceGuard

    The budget vs actual report finance teams send every month.

    Spending against plan each month, the variance that tells you where the cash went, and a dashboard a co-founder can filter.

  • Marketing dashboard in Excel with slicers at work (MarketPulse): KPI cards, a spend against revenue chart and a monthly ring, filtered to one channel by the Channel and Campaign slicers.

    Project 08

    MarketPulse

    One screen that shows which campaigns earn back their spend.

    Growth figures on a single page: click-through rate, conversion rate and return on investment as KPI cards, with slicers and a timeline for any campaign or month.

  • Power Query sales report in Excel (SalesFusion): sales by category, sales by region and a monthly trend, with slicers for channel, year, category and region.

    Project 12

    SalesFusion

    A sales report that refreshes itself from a folder of files.

    Exports from the payment, CRM and advertising tools you use, cleaned and joined by Power Query so the figures come from one table.

  • Claude AI in Excel fixing a formula: the Claude panel explains the mistake in a unit cost column and edits the cells, beside the profit percentage column.

    Project 14

    Agentic AI in Excel

    AI finds and fixes the formula; you check it before it counts.

    Questions about your own numbers put to Copilot, ChatGPT or Claude, with a checklist that catches a wrong answer before it reaches a board update.

  • Project 03

    Sales Goal Tracker

    SUMIFS and COUNTIFS for revenue and deals by month and stage, and date arithmetic with TODAY for the days since a deal's expected close date.

Lessons

The lessons that matter, in course order.

The Complete Excel Course with AI Integration has 186 lessons. This page picks out 69 of them, 5 h 41 min of video. Each lesson keeps its number in the course.

Where to start

Lesson 36 SUMIF and COUNTIF in Excel

Begin at Lesson 36 if you already use Excel: monthly totals with SUMIFS come first. New to Excel? Begin at Lesson 1; the early sections lead up to this point. If SUMIFS and PivotTables are familiar, go to Lesson 115 for spending against budget or Lesson 153 for Power Query.

69 of 186 lessons · 5 h 41 min

04 Essential formulas and functions (IF, SUMIF and more) 4 of 13 lessons · 25 min SUMIF and SUMIFS for revenue and costs by month and category, COUNTIF and COUNTIFS for deals by stage, and date functions such as MONTH and TODAY to put each line in its month. The lessons use sales figures.
  1. 36 Start here 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
06 Data visualisation: charts and graphs 1 of 9 lessons · 5 min The funnel chart for a sales pipeline, with the Pareto and waterfall charts beside it: a waterfall shows how a starting figure moves to an end figure step by step.
  1. 55 Funnel, Pareto and waterfall charts in Excel Modern charts for business data 5 min
07 PivotTables and PivotCharts: data analysis made easy 10 lessons · 33 min PivotTables, the base the dashboards are built on: totals by month and category, grouping by date, slicers, PivotCharts and a refresh when new data comes in. The lessons use sales orders.
  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
10 Boosting productivity with AI in Excel (Copilot, ChatGPT and Claude) 17 lessons · 1 h 20 min AI across the work: what Copilot, ChatGPT and Claude can and cannot do, preparing data, summaries, PivotTables, charts and formulas from prompts, outliers, a mini dashboard, a QA checklist, ChatGPT as an analysis planner, the COPILOT function, Microsoft Stride and Claude in Excel.
  1. 88 AI in Excel What Copilot, ChatGPT and Claude can and cannot do 8 min
  2. 89 Prepare data for Copilot in Excel Tables, headers and clean structure 6 min
  3. 90 Copilot executive summary in Excel Summarise a dataset in seconds with AI 5 min
  4. 91 Copilot prompts for Excel Weak vs strong prompts and the PRO prompt pattern 5 min
  5. 92 PivotTables with Copilot Build an Excel PivotTable from a prompt 5 min
  6. 93 Charts with Copilot and ChatGPT Create and choose the right Excel chart 6 min
  7. 94 Conditional formatting with Copilot and ChatGPT Highlight problems in Excel 4 min
  8. 95 Excel formulas with AI Copilot and ChatGPT write formula columns you verify 6 min
  9. 96 Find outliers with Copilot in Excel Discounts, negative profit, suspect rows 7 min
  10. 97 Clean messy data with Copilot in Excel AI prompts plus Excel functions 4 min
  11. 98 Mini dashboard with Copilot in Excel KPIs, charts and slicers on one page 3 min
  12. 99 Check AI output in Excel A quick QA checklist for Copilot results 2 min
  13. 100 ChatGPT as your analysis planner Plan an Excel analysis before you build it 3 min
  14. 101 COPILOT function in Excel Use Copilot as a formula inside your cells 4 min
  15. 102 Copilot guided help in Excel Step-by-step AI help inside Excel 3 min
  16. 103 Microsoft Stride for Excel The Office Agent that builds workbooks for you 4 min
  17. 104 Claude in Excel Analyse data and build spreadsheets with Claude 7 min
11 MarketPulse campaign intelligence dashboard 10 lessons · 50 min MarketPulse: clean campaign data, plan the KPIs with ChatGPT and Copilot, calculate click-through rate, conversion rate and return on investment with IFERROR, then build the dashboard with PivotTables, charts, a timeline, KPI cards and slicers.
  1. 105 MarketPulse marketing dashboard in Excel Project overview and campaign data 4 min
  2. 106 Clean and check marketing data in Excel Remove duplicates, Copilot KPI plan 4 min
  3. 107 Plan a marketing dashboard with ChatGPT KPIs and the PivotTable strategy 4 min
  4. 108 Marketing PivotTables in Excel Build the MarketPulse pivot back end 6 min
  5. 109 CTR, conversion rate and ROI in Excel Marketing KPI formulas with IFERROR 4 min
  6. 110 PivotTables with Copilot Generate and verify marketing pivots in Excel 6 min
  7. 111 Marketing charts and a timeline in Excel MarketPulse dashboard PivotCharts 4 min
  8. 112 KPI cards in Excel Marketing KPI cards for the MarketPulse dashboard 7 min
  9. 113 Slicers for an Excel dashboard Interactive filtering in MarketPulse 4 min
  10. 114 Polish an Excel marketing dashboard Final formatting and insights in MarketPulse 9 min
12 Project: FinanceGuard budget variance analyser (budget vs actual Excel dashboard) 10 lessons · 52 min FinanceGuard: budget and actual tables, a model built with SUMIFS, SORT, UNIQUE, VSTACK and LET, variance and percent variance, colour-coded number formats, then KPI cards, a combo chart and slicers.
  1. 115 FinanceGuard budget vs actual dashboard Excel project overview 3 min
  2. 116 Excel tables for budget and actual data Organise the FinanceGuard datasets 4 min
  3. 117 Budget vs actual model in Excel SORT, UNIQUE, VSTACK, LET, TEXTSPLIT, SUMIFS 8 min
  4. 118 Budget variance in Excel Calculate variance and percent variance 4 min
  5. 119 Custom number formats in Excel Show budget variances with colours and signs 2 min
  6. 120 PivotTables for budget vs actual The FinanceGuard pivot workspace 8 min
  7. 121 KPI cards in Excel Summary cards for a budget variance dashboard 4 min
  8. 122 Budget vs actual charts in Excel Combo chart with secondary axis for variance 5 min
  9. 123 Slicers and PivotCharts in Excel Interactive FinanceGuard budget dashboard 4 min
  10. 124 Finish the FinanceGuard dashboard in Excel Final polish and variance insights 10 min
15 SalesFusion: advanced data tools and a Power Query modelling system 16 of 21 lessons · 1 h 28 min Power Query for tool exports: import a CSV, clean columns and text, fix data types, add month fields, add conditional columns, merge tables on a shared ID, append each new period and combine a folder of files into one table.
  1. 153 SalesFusion Power Query project Excel ETL pipeline and data model overview 5 min
  2. 154 Introduction to Power Query in Excel The ETL workflow explained 5 min
  3. 155 Import a CSV with Power Query Get data from text and transform data 2 min
  4. 156 Clean columns in Power Query Remove and rename columns for modelling 5 min
  5. 157 Clean text in Power Query Trim, clean, replace values and fix text case 6 min
  6. 158 Data types in Power Query Fix date, whole number, decimal and text types 7 min
  7. 159 Date columns in Power Query Add year, month and year-month fields for reports 7 min
  8. 160 Business logic in Power Query Custom and conditional columns for profitability 6 min
  9. 161 Group By in Power Query Summarise sales by month and region to validate data 5 min
  10. 162 Close and Load in Power Query Connection only, table or Data Model 5 min
  11. 163 Merge queries in Power Query Look up product and region names with a left join 5 min
  12. 164 Reuse a Power Query pipeline Duplicate queries for a new year of sales data 5 min
  13. 165 Append queries in Power Query Combine 2024 and 2025 sales tables 3 min
  14. 166 From Folder in Power Query Combine every sales file in a folder automatically 9 min
  15. 167 From Folder automation in Power Query Profit metrics and fiscal year columns 7 min
  16. 168 Build a sales fact table in Power Query Merge lookups and append history 6 min
15 SalesFusion: advanced data tools and a Power Query modelling system 1 of 21 lessons · 8 min Unpivot turns a sheet with months across the top into rows, the shape PivotTables and SUMIFS work with.
  1. 173 Unpivot columns in Power Query Turn wide month columns into a long table 8 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 helps startup founders with their numbers?

The Complete Excel Course with AI Integration from Coding Liquids helps with the operating numbers: revenue and costs by month with SUMIFS, the FinanceGuard budget against actual, a MarketPulse dashboard with conversion rate and return on investment, Power Query for exports from your tools, and AI with a checklist for its answers. It does not teach investor models. This path comes to 69 lessons, 5 hours 41 minutes in all.

Does it teach investor financial models or cap tables?

No. Investor financial models, cap tables, cohort analysis and fundraising are not taught in The Complete Excel Course with AI Integration. Its models are a budget against actual dashboard and a personal investment plan. What it gives a founder is the monthly reporting underneath: clean data, totals by month, spending against budget and a KPI dashboard.

Can I build a KPI dashboard for my team or investors?

Yes. MarketPulse in The Complete Excel Course with AI Integration builds one from PivotTables, KPI formulas with IFERROR, KPI cards, charts, a timeline and slicers, on campaign data with click-through rate, conversion rate and return on investment. FinanceGuard adds budget against actual with its own KPI cards. Which metrics your investors expect is for you to decide.

Can Excel combine data exported from several apps?

Yes, with Power Query, which The Complete Excel Course with AI Integration teaches on sales files: import each CSV export, clean and type the columns, merge two tables on a shared ID, append a new month and combine a whole folder at once. None of the lessons on this path is marked as needing Windows; the Power Pivot lessons, which do, are left out.

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.

See the plans Watch free lessons

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