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If you’re on your phone now, that’s fine. Enrol now and we’ll email you a link so you can pick up when you’re at a computer.
Excel · Foundations
Build a sales summary workbook someone else can open and read.
What you’ll end up with
One finished workbook. The original export, a cleaned and sortable table, a summary of every branch and category, a column chart, and a print-ready summary page.
10
hours in all — about 6½ guided, 3½ on your own
6
sessions. Each designed to be completed in one sitting
Free
No payment and no card required.
Finishing gives you a completion record showing the work you built, and all three levels earn the Alongrail Certificate in Excel. See what you’ll build →
You don’t need prior experience with Excel for the web. There’s no payment and no card required.
From one raw file to a finished workbook
0175 min
Open the export and make it yours
You have the export saved as a workbook of your own, named, with the header row staying in view, and you know exactly how many rows you were sent.
02100 min
Find what is wrong with it, and take it out
The export's own summary row is gone, the repeated order lines are gone, the order lines are a named table, and the table counts itself.
03110 min
Clean it with formulas, not by hand
Three new columns hold a branch name you can group by, a quantity you can add up, and a category that is never blank — and the table proves it by totalling the quantity.
04105 min
Work out what a line is worth, and what the file is worth
Every order line carries a money figure you wrote, and a Summary sheet holds six figures for the whole file, each one naming the column it came from.
05115 min
Summarise it by branch and by category
The Summary sheet answers the manager's question: what every branch sold, how many order lines it took, what share of the whole it carries, and the same for every category.
0695 min
Show it, and hand it over
The Summary sheet carries a titled chart, states the largest branch figure, prints as a page, and says where its numbers came from — and every figure in it still agrees with every other.
What you need before you start
A laptop or desktop
Sessions need a laptop or desktop. If you’re on your phone now, that’s fine. Enrol now and we’ll email you a link so you can pick up when you’re at a computer. Excel for the web runs in the browser, on Windows or a Mac.
Chrome or Edge
Alongrail runs in the browser too, in its own tab beside Excel for the web.
The course files
Everything you work with is in the download.
What’s free
The whole course: every session, both parts, the files, and your record. Alongrail charges nothing for it. No payment, and no card at any point.
The software
Excel for the web costs nothing for this course.
The data you’ll work with
Every file is invented — the companies, the people and everything in them are made up for the course, and the files are deliberately messy, the way real business data is. Cleaning them is part of the work.
Before you start
The course covers Excel for the web, in your browser.
- A Microsoft account. The free personal kind is enough, and Excel for the web comes with it at no cost.
- A web browser and a working connection. Excel for the web does not run without one.
- The supplied export, orders.csv, saved where you can find it again.
- About an hour of quiet for each session.
Alongrail teaches the software and gives you a record of what you built, with a link to the work itself. What happens with it afterwards is yours. We don’t place people and we take no part in anyone’s recruitment process.
Enrol free and start now.
Sign in, confirm the one thing the course needs, and session 1 opens. No payment, and no card at any point.
If something goes wrong on the way, press “Something’s wrong” in the panel, or write to hello@alongrail.com — we reply within one working day.
Frequently asked questions
What you build
A sales summary workbook someone else can open and read, where every figure traces back to a formula you wrote and can explain.
One workbook. The export exactly as it arrived, a cleaned table you can sort and filter, a summary of every branch and every category with each branch's share of the whole, a column chart, and a page that prints without cutting anything short.
How a session works
- Open Excel for the web
- Share your screen
- One instruction
- You do it
- It confirms it
- Next
You open Excel for the web and share your screen. Alongrail reads what’s there and gives you one instruction. You do it. It confirms the step landed, then gives you the next one. If something doesn’t match what you see, one button gets you back on track.
Guided
In the Fields list, tick Region. The chart fills in.
One field on the axis, one measure as the value.
then
On your owna different company’s data
Same job, a different company's files. Alongrail stays quiet until you ask.
Guided, then on your own.
The second part of every session uses a different company’s data, with the same kind of mess in different places. Alongrail stays quiet until you ask. It’s the work your record points to.
About 10 hours in all·about 6½ guided·about 3½ on your own
What you earn — the record, the certificate and a sample
Completion record
- Name
- Your name
- Course
- Excel Foundations
- Completed
- The date you finish
- Project
- The workbook you built on your own →
- Skills demonstrated
- Turning an export somebody else produced into a workbook of your own, and knowing how much of it there is before touching a cell · Finding what is wrong with a supplied file and removing it deliberately, knowing what went and why · Cleaning text and numbers with formulas rather than by hand · Working out a figure for every row and totalling it for the whole file · Summarising by category with one formula repeated, and checking the summary against the whole · Presenting a summary as a chart and a page fit to hand over · Checking your own work at every stage without being told the answer
What was built
One workbook. The export exactly as it arrived, a cleaned table you can sort and filter, a summary of every branch and every category with each branch's share of the whole, a column chart, and a page that prints without cutting anything short.
The 6 sessions, and when each was completed on their own
Each session was completed twice: once with step-by-step guidance on one company’s data, then on a second company’s data from a brief, with guidance only when asked. Every check passed on both. Alongrail records the sessions, the checks and the dates; the dashboard itself is the learner’s own, hosted where they chose.
A completion record for Excel Foundations, now. It names the course, the date you finished, the skills you demonstrated, and links the workbook you built on your own. It’s private until you publish it, and you can unpublish it at any time.
The record is a description of work you did, not a claim about you. Anyone who opens it can see the work for themselves.
The Alongrail Certificate in Excel when all three levels are complete. Foundations is the first of three. Practitioner and Professional are in development, with no dates. See the track →
How this relates to a certification — the course covers the core skills assessed in Microsoft Office Specialist: Excel Associate, exam MO-210. That exam is booked and paid for separately through Certiport, and its fee has nothing to do with this course, which is free.
Your screen stays yours
It looks when you ask. Never otherwise. Images of your screen are not stored. What Alongrail sees →
Nothing you build is public until you publish it. Your record is private until you say so, and you can unpublish it at any time.
What’s Excel for the web?
Excel for the web is the software this course is built in. It runs in your browser.
You won’t learn it by watching hours of tutorials. You’ll learn it by building something real with it.
Who you’re building it for
Ashcroft Garden Supplies runs five branches. Every branch sends its order lines to head office, and what arrives is a raw export from the till system: one row for every order line, half a trading year of them. Nobody has checked it. The regional manager wants one workbook she can open on a Monday morning and read without asking anyone what a number means. She needs to see what each branch sold, how many order lines each one took, which categories are moving, and what share of the total each branch is carrying. You are the one building it, and she will ask you where the numbers came from.
Your job is to build the workbook that answers it.
Do I need to know Excel for the web already?
No. The course assumes you’ve never opened it.
What if I get stuck?
Press the button in the panel and say what you see. Alongrail works out where you actually are and picks the instruction back up.
Why 10 hours, when other courses are 40?
Because the time is spent doing the work rather than watching it. About 6½ hours is guided; the rest is you building the same thing again on your own.
What does Alongrail see on my screen?
Only the window you choose to share, and only when you ask it to look. Images of your screen are not stored by Alongrail. What Alongrail sees →
Can I use a Mac?
Yes. Excel for the web runs in the browser.
What if I miss a week?
Nothing closes. The dates are there to help you keep moving, not to catch you out.
Does this prepare me for a certification exam?
Covers the core skills assessed in Microsoft Office Specialist: Excel Associate, exam MO-210. That exam is booked and paid for separately through Certiport, and its fee has nothing to do with this course, which is free. Alongrail is not an exam provider.
What’s the “on your own” part?
The second half of every session: the same work on a different company’s data, with Alongrail quiet unless you ask. Both parts are needed for your completion record.
Is it really free?
Yes. No payment, and no card at any point.
Who can see what I build?
Nobody, until you say so. Your record is private until you publish it, and you can unpublish it at any time. What you build stays in your own files or account; where a step publishes something to the software’s own site, the step says so and says who can see it.
Where this course sits
Excel Foundations is Foundations in Excel. The track has three levels; each one you complete earns its own record, and all of them together earn the Alongrail Certificate in Excel. All the courses →