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Excel for Work: From Blank Sheet to Reports People Trust

The Excel (and Google Sheets) that Nigerian offices actually run on: formulas, lookups, cleaning, pivot tables, charts, and the reports and templates that get you noticed.

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About this course

Almost every office job in Nigeria, from a bank branch to an NGO field office to a cement depot, runs on spreadsheets, and the person who can make them work fast, correctly and clearly is the one who gets trusted with more. This course takes you from a blank sheet to reports people rely on. You will learn to enter and structure data properly, write the formulas that do real work, look values up across sheets, clean the messy exports every business produces, summarise thousands of rows with pivot tables in minutes, build charts that answer a question, and produce the recurring reports, trackers and templates that run a department: a sales report, a petty cash book, a payroll summary, a stock register, an invoice. Every lesson works on the same realistic dataset, Mama Ngozi Foods, a Lagos food distributor with three branches, so the skills build on each other. Google Sheets is covered alongside Excel throughout, because many Nigerian workplaces use both. Free practice files are included.

Halima Bello started as accounts assistant at Mama Ngozi Foods on a Monday. By 9.15 a.m. the general manager, Mrs Ngozi Okonkwo, had sent her a WhatsApp message: a file called sales.csv and one line, 'Which branch did best in August, and how much are customers still owing us? Before lunch, please.' Halima opened the file on her phone. It was a wall of numbers: 1,769 rows, eleven columns, invoice codes, product codes, dates, naira amounts. Her predecessor had answered such questions by scrolling and adding on a calculator. Halima had used Excel at university, but only to type marks into a grid. There had to be a better way, and by lunchtime she had found it. This lesson is that better way.

What you'll learn

Course syllabus — 12 lessons

  1. The spreadsheet that runs the office15 min
  2. Entering and formatting data properly15 min
  3. Formulas and references that do not break16 min
  4. Decisions in cells: IF, AND, OR and the IFS family16 min
  5. Looking things up: XLOOKUP, VLOOKUP and INDEX/MATCH16 min
  6. Cleaning the messy export17 min
  7. Dates, text and time: the functions offices need16 min
  8. Pivot tables: thousands of rows, one minute16 min
  9. Charts that answer a question15 min
  10. Conditional formatting, validation and controls: a workbook other people cannot break16 min
  11. The reports and templates that run a department16 min
  12. Working faster, checking yourself, and the project17 min

Your project

Your Monthly Management Report Workbook

One workbook, shared as a Google Sheets link with view access or an uploaded .xlsx file, with the six named sheets and formulas left live.

Certificates on Skillnaija are earned, not issued for attendance: you submit this project, it is graded against a rubric, and passing issues a certificate anyone can verify. See the full project brief, rubric and free workbook →

Frequently asked questions

Is Excel for Work: From Blank Sheet to Reports People Trust free?

Yes. Excel for Work: From Blank Sheet to Reports People Trust is completely free on Skillnaija. You need a free account to open the lessons, and there is no charge for the course, the project, or the certificate.

How long does Excel for Work: From Blank Sheet to Reports People Trust take to complete?

6 weeks · ~4 hrs/week. There are 12 lessons, about 3 hours of material in total. You learn at your own pace and your progress is saved.

Do I need any experience to start Excel for Work: From Blank Sheet to Reports People Trust?

Beginner-friendly. You can start from scratch — no prior experience is assumed.

What will I learn in Excel for Work: From Blank Sheet to Reports People Trust?

You will build practical skills in Structuring data as clean tables, Formulas and references that do not break, IF, SUMIFS, COUNTIFS and conditional logic, XLOOKUP, VLOOKUP and INDEX/MATCH, Cleaning messy exports, Dates, text and number formatting, Pivot tables and pivot charts, Charts that answer a question, Conditional formatting and data validation, Printing, sharing and protecting workbooks, Recurring reports and templates, Google Sheets alongside Excel. Every lesson is written for a Nigerian context, with examples drawn from how the work is actually done and paid for here.

Do I get a certificate for Excel for Work: From Blank Sheet to Reports People Trust?

Yes, but it has to be earned. You complete the course project — Your Monthly Management Report Workbook and submit it for grading. Passing the project issues a verifiable certificate; finishing the lessons alone does not.

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