Excel Classes for High School Students Near Me

Excel is one of the most commonly used desktop applications in the world, particularly in professional settings. The spreadsheet application is essential for almost all data-entry and record-keeping tasks, and its automated features and accessible marco system make it a versatile tool that students can use regardless of their training level. Excel training can involve detailed training in the application (with the aim of helping students learn advanced features of the application like data visualization or VLOOKUP) or introductory lessons in the basics of using the program to organize simple data into spreadsheets (for everything from shopping lists to home finances). Specific Excel skills are often taught as part of broader training programs, such as in finance or data science classes, allowing students to tailor their Excel training to meet their specific needs.

Why High School Students Should Learn Excel

Learning Excel is a valuable skill regardless of your future plans or how much training you opt to receive. Students who learn a bit about the program can start to set up automated spreadsheets that help them keep track of personal finances, create to-do lists or keep track of things like fitness routines or track daily goals. Students who enroll in an advanced training course can learn career-focused Excel skills in fields ranging from data science and machine learning to finance and investing. This training will help students get a foothold on their training in preparation for applying to college courses or their future careers. Learning Excel on its own is a very useful practical skill for anyone to pick up, and learning Excel as part of a more developed training program will help build a foundation of knowledge and expertise that can be further refined in professional training programs or college classes.

In-Person Excel Classes

Students interested in learning Excel in person should explore the options offered by local colleges and community centers. Since Excel is an important program with a wide range of applications, many colleges and training centers offer a variety of courses, including courses in basic and advanced Excel skills and courses in professional fields of study that touch on Excel. Students should also consider exploring options for Microsoft Office training which is almost certain to cover Excel. Students should also consider exploring their options for college-level classes that teach Excel and offer transferable credit, assuming they know what kind of Excel training they need.

Virtual Excel Classes

Students who live outside of major metropolitan areas may be slightly more limited in their options for in-person Excel training. These students (and students who don’t want to commute) may want to consider enrolling in an online Excel training course. Online training programs allow students to work with professional instructors in real-time from the comfort of their homes, and recent advances in online pedagogy have made these classes comparable to in-person training. Live online classes are often as productive and effective as on-campus courses, with the added benefit of being significantly more accessible.

NextGen Bootcamp offers an Excel, Finance, & Investing Summer Program Live Online that will help students develop the financial literacy skills needed to establish a foundation for long-term fiscal independence. This course will teach students how to use Excel to monitor their finances, forecast investment strategies, build and track their portfolio and create complex automated functions to help with budgeting and tracking. Students will also learn how to read financial statements, judge the overall value of a company and make sound investment decisions that are designed to maximize long-term ROI. This course is ideal for students to learn valuable and applicable life skills while simultaneously picking up transferable Excel training.

NextGen Bootcamp also offers a Python Data Science Summer Program Live Online that will cover the use of Excel as a database tool for students looking to learn advanced data wrangling, analysis and visualization skills. This course primarily covers the Python programming language and its use in data science tasks, making it ideal for students looking to learn advanced Excel functions that make data-related tasks easier and more viable. Students will also learn the basics of machine learning algorithms and build a foundation of knowledge in this cutting-edge aspect of professional data analysis.

How to Choose an Excel Class

High school students should be judicious when they are choosing what kind of Excel course to attend. Students will need to consider factors such as accessibility, cost and format. Students will also need to consider their long-term goals for the course and why they want to learn Excel.

The first major consideration for students is going to be accessibility and whether or not they can easily attend any given course. Since many in-person classes are held either at college campuses or local community centers, students must consider whether they can (or want) to commute across the city to attend an in-person course. This also assumes that these classes are physically accessible to students. In terms of online courses, students should consider how easy it will be for them to remain online for several hours a day and whether or not they have any obligations that might interrupt their studies.

The other major consideration is the cost of the program. Some summer courses for high school students can be fairly expensive, so you should consider what you are getting for the price. Live online classes tend to be more expensive than other online classes, but they benefit from letting students work with live instructors who can provide them with personalized support and feedback. Students looking to learn basic Excel skills may find that they don’t necessarily need live support and can enroll in an asynchronous class, but students looking to learn more than how to input data and write functions are likely to benefit immensely from guided training.

Finally, students should consider whether or not they want to learn just Excel skills or if they plan to learn Excel as part of a larger training program. Since there are many different ways to approach Excel training, students must ensure that they are enrolled in a course that is teaching them the skills they want to learn (to not waste time, energy and money). If you are interested in learning Excel to help track your finances and data, enrolling in a data science program doesn't make sense. Likewise, if you want to learn investing skills, it makes more sense to learn Excel as part of that training rather than on its own.