Become great at Excel and Google Sheets
Find actionable marketing insights using Excel and Google Sheets
Online course:
Excel and Sheets for marketers
By Fred Pike, Managing director @ Northwoods
Course length: 3h 40min
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Find actionable marketing insights
Everyone thinks they know Excel, but this dismissive assumption may be costing you a lot of growth opportunities and wholly avoidable headaches.
Throughout this in-depth course, you will learn to
- Import data from multiple sources into Excel or Sheets.
- Discover the best way to tie this data together and make it useful.
- Understand when to use pivot tables and the different lookup types (vlookup, hlookup, and index/match).
- Understand basic spreadsheet troubleshooting skills.
- Learn how to use many of the data-manipulation commands in Excel/Sheets.
- Learn how to apply formulas and work with data to pull insights.
- Analyze data and answer business questions using spreadsheets.
Introduction video (5min)

You’re at a huge loss if you can’t functionally use spreadsheets
The business world runs on Excel. You’d be hard-pressed to find a business that doesn’t use it. If you work in growth, marketing, analytics, product, or content, chances are you use it on a daily basis.
Unfortunately, you’re probably not as proficient at Excel as you think you are. It’s not an insult, and it’s certainly not a falsity. In reality, most marketers are just scratching the surface when it comes to spreadsheet work
Combine data sources to discover even more marketing insights
Whether you’re analyzing sales data or calculating the performance of marketing strategies, you’ll find yourself using Excel. Excel can help you optimize your marketing processes, tweak and decide on campaigns, and even track day to day variations in data. No one in the digital world should be operating without this skill.
Most digital marketing tools let you interact with data within their own platform. This is often perfectly fine to view and analyze data, especially at a high level. However, you most likely have multiple sources of data, and it’s almost always the case that these sources of data can be blended to reach deeper conclusions about your marketing efforts.
Pull the data to Excel or Google Sheets
Once there, you have tremendous flexibility and power to link the data and get insights. It’s not necessarily difficult to use Excel, it’s just that Excel isn’t usually taught in a way that is practical and focused on generating actionable insights. In addition, it’s rare you’re shown step-by-step instructions on how to use its more advanced features.
That’s why we created this course.
This course won’t give you prepackaged takeaways – you know your data and its nuances more than we ever could. But what this course will do is teach you how to use Excel efficiently to uncover those insights on your own. It will be another tool in your arsenal – a very effective tool, at that – to make better marketing decisions.
Don’t just scratch the surface
This course is perfect for beginners seeking to learn how to utilize Excel to manage and extract meaning from data, specifically in relation to marketing. Even if you’ve spent a lot of time in Excel, it’s likely you’ll learn some more advanced techniques to get more out of the tool.
Most of the examples will be drawn from marketing tools you use every day – Google Analytics, Search Console, AdWords, Moz, etc. If you’re a marketer, you’ll receive concrete, explicit, and immediately actionable takeaways from this course.
This course will primarily focus on Excel, but we’ll also touch on Google Sheets, as it’s often easier to access data there.

This course is right for you if…
- Your daily work includes working with data across multiple tools (e.g. Google Analytics, Google Search Console, SEMRush, Moz, AdWords. Keyword Planner, etc.)
- You are sometimes stymied by the data analysis capabilities of those tools, and would like to dive deeper or dive more broadly
- Your success and future growth depends on being able to discover the links between data sets
This course is probably not for you if…
- You can do pivot sheets and vlookups in your sleep
- You know best practices in setting up spreadsheets and formulas including troubleshooting errors
- You’ve written and debugged Excel macros
Skills you should have before taking this course
- You should have at least a basic and introductory familiarity with spreadsheets
- e.g. how to create formulas, import files, possibly create some simple graphs, etc.
- More importantly, you should have an understanding of your data and what type of information you want to draw out of it.
About
Fred Pike

Fred got his start with spreadsheets using VisiCalc, the very first electronic spreadsheet. Fred is the CFO at Northwoods, where he continues to use spreadsheets regularly. He believes that spreadsheet literacy – being fluent in the language and usage of spreadsheets – is something everybody should have. Spreadsheets are the common language of data – you can download just about anything to a spreadsheet. Once there, and with the proper skills, you can work data magic.
Fred also leads the Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager team at Northwoods.
After this course, you’ll be able to…
- Import, blend, and analyze data from multiple sources.
- Format the data in a way to best work with it and share it across teams.
- Execute pivot table analysis, common (and powerful functions), and different types of lookups (vlookup, hlookup, and index/match).
- Do basic troubleshooting and fix mistakes most people make when working with spreadsheets.
- Use many of the data-manipulation commands in Excel/Sheets.
- Generally be an efficient and effective spreadsheet user, able to pull insights from many data sources and work with it to answer business questions.
Your full course curriculum
Excel and sheets for marketers
1 GSC – Sort and Filter
Topics covered:
- Download data from Google search Console (GSC)
- Initial Analysis - Sort and Filter
2 SUM – Variations
Topics covered:
- SUM Commands
- Variables in formulas
- Absolute versus Relative cell references
3 COUNT – Variations
Topics covered:
- All the different COUNT commands.
4 Tables and Calculated Columns
Topics covered:
- Formatting Headers
- Excel Tables and Calculated Columns
5 Pivot Tables – Set Up – Sheets
Topics covered:
- Set up a basic pivot table in Google Sheets
6 Pivot Tables – Set Up – Excel
Topics covered:
- Set up a basic pivot table in Excel
7 Pivot Tables – Calculated Fields
Topics covered:
- How to create a calculated field in a pivot table
- Why create it?
8 Pivot Tables – Filters, Slicers, and Timeline – Excel
Topics covered:
- Segmenting your pivot table:
- Filters
- Slicers
- Timeline
9 Pivot Tables – Filters, Slicers, and Timeline – Sheets
Topics covered:
- Segmenting your pivot table
- Filters
- Slicers
10 Power Tips for Pivot Tables – Excel
Topics covered:
- Power Tips for Pivot Tables
- Tables and Named Ranges
- Refresh the Data Source
- Detailed view
- Page per Filter Item
- “Show Values As” in Field Settings
- Turn off “Autofit Columns”
- Pivot Charts
11 De-Dup & Text To Columns
Topics covered:
- Google Analytics Data
- Remove Duplicates
- Text to Column
12 Vlookup
Topics covered:
- Vlookup
13 Index and Match
Topics covered:
- Index and Match
14 XLookup – Excel
Topics covered:
- XLOOKUP
- Do you have it?
- Shortcomings of VLOOKUP
15 Sparklines
Topics covered:
- Sparklines
16 Conditional Formatting
Topics covered:
- Conditional formatting
17 String Functions
Topics covered:
- More Functions
- Len
- Substitute
- Find
- Search
- Mid
- Left
- Right
18 Error Trapping
Topics covered:
- Data Validation
- Numbers
- Lists
- IF Function (cross-footing)
- Locking a Spreadsheet
19 Additional Resources
Topics covered:
- Some of Fred's favorite resources
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