Excel lets us store, organize, and analyze our data all in the same place. This makes Excel a great one-stop-shop for exploring a dataset prior to performing a formal analysis. In this lesson, we’ll cover three standard Excel methods for data exploration:

• calculating averages and other statistics using formulas
• organizing data using sorting
• zooming in on the data we care about by filtering

Each exercise in this lesson will come with an interactive Excel spreadsheet for you to download. The spreadsheet will give you instructions to practice what you’ve learned, provide hints, and give feedback on your answers.

Even old hands at Excel sometimes get stuck on seemingly “simple” tasks, so if you get stuck, please consult the solutions or ask a question in the forums, even if you think you “should” be able to do it.