Course description

Google Sheets is free, works in your web browser and makes it easy to share one up-to-date spreadsheet with your team. This course takes you from a blank sheet to a simple, shareable dashboard, one clear step at a time, with no spreadsheet experience needed.

It's a full course of 10 sections and 50 written lessons. You follow the volunteer coordinator of a small repair café and tool library as he moves paper records and an old Excel file into Google Sheets, shares them safely with the trustees, cleans up volunteer sign-ups and builds a half-year dashboard for a funder. Every lesson describes each click in words and tells you the numbers you should see, and every section has a practice pack with realistic data, a worksheet, model answers and a one-page cheat sheet.

What you'll learn

• The basics: creating and finding spreadsheets in Google Drive, entering data, and importing CSV and Excel files.
• Formatting: UK dates, pounds and percentages, readable layouts, freezing, safe sorting, filters, filter views and tables.
• Formulas: SUM, AVERAGE, IF, COUNTIFS, SUMIFS, XLOOKUP, text and date functions, absolute references and fixing errors.
• Working together: sharing with the right roles, comments and tasks, version history, protected ranges and handling personal data.
• Clean data: drop-downs, tick boxes, conditional formatting, tidying messy lists and collecting data with Google Forms.
• Analysis and charts: FILTER, UNIQUE, pivot tables, monthly summaries, charts, scorecards and sparklines.
• Dashboards: planning, building and sharing a simple interactive dashboard with slicers.

Who it's for

Beginners who need Google Sheets at work or as a volunteer, especially in charities, community groups, schools and small teams. All you need is a computer with a web browser and a free Google account or a work Google Workspace account. It ends with a final project where you build a dashboard from your own data or from a second practice scenario.

What will I learn?

• Create, organise and find spreadsheets in Google Drive, and import CSV and Excel files
• Format data clearly with UK dates, pounds and percentages, and sort and filter it safely
• Write formulas with SUM, AVERAGE, IF, COUNTIFS, SUMIFS, XLOOKUP and date and text functions
• Share spreadsheets safely with the right roles, and use comments, version history and protected ranges
• Keep data clean with drop-downs, tick boxes, conditional formatting and Google Forms
• Summarise data with FILTER, UNIQUE and pivot tables, and check your figures
• Make clear charts, scorecards and sparklines
• Build, share and maintain a simple interactive dashboard

Frequently asked questions