Excel for the Real World III: Create a Data-Driven Presentation from Excel to PowerPoint
Al Chen · Excel Trainer & Coda Evangelist
A guided walkthrough of a real AdWords dataset that turns raw spreadsheet chores into an actual boardroom-ready slide.
A real dataset, not a toy example
This course closes out a three-part series by putting a full analysis in front of the learner: about 350 rows of anonymized Google AdWords data covering an online store's Q4 2012 campaign, tracking budget, clicks, impressions, click-through rate, cost per click, and converted clicks by week and product. Rather than teaching isolated Excel features, the class frames the whole thing as a business problem. The instructor poses a question the fictional Acme CEO needs answered: does online advertising actually work, and where should the budget go? That framing carries through every lesson and is the course's biggest strength. Data cleanup, filtering, and chart-building all exist in service of answering that question, not as features demonstrated in a vacuum.
The middle stretch is where the technical value sits. The MID formula lesson is a genuinely useful piece of instruction: rather than just saying "strip a prefix," it walks through counting character positions to find where a product name starts inside a string like "ACME & Small Walnut Bowl," then padding the character count generously so nothing gets truncated. It is a small, specific technique, but it is the kind of formula skill that generalizes to almost any messy dataset pulled from a database export. The filtering and PivotTable segment is more procedural: setting a cost threshold, sorting descending, and eyeballing what floats to the top. It works, but it leans on manual inspection rather than teaching a repeatable analytical framework, so a learner hoping for deeper PivotTable mechanics (calculated fields, grouping, slicers) will not find them here.
Where the course adds real value
The strongest conceptual material shows up in the trend-detection and hypothesis-revisiting lessons. The course does not just chart the data, it interrogates it: noticing that the most expensive product to advertise drove exactly one purchase, while a far cheaper campaign drove nearly fifty, and using that gap to model the kind of question a CEO would actually ask. Revisiting the original hypotheses, one confirmed, one rejected, gives the whole exercise a satisfying narrative arc that most spreadsheet tutorials skip entirely.
The formatting lesson is a smaller but practical bonus: zeroing out a truncated y-axis, stripping gridlines and legends, and swapping a pie chart for a two-bar comparison are habits worth having, and the instructor explains the reasoning rather than just clicking through settings.
The limits
At 83 minutes, the course moves fast, and some of that speed shows. The PivotTable work is thinner than the title suggests, statistical rigor is basically absent (there is no confidence testing behind "the hypothesis is supported"), and the final presentation lesson, while a nice capstone, is more about slide layout than Excel skill. It is squarely a follow-along project for someone who already has the fundamentals from the earlier two parts in this series; without that grounding, the pace will feel rushed rather than efficient.
The standout
The MID formula walkthrough for stripping the ACME & prefix is the clearest, most transferable technique, showing exactly how to count start position and character length rather than just naming the function.
What you will learn
- Using MID (with start position and character count) to strip prefixes like ACME & from a text column
- Applying number formatting (currency, percentage, decimal places) to clean up inconsistent raw data
- Filtering and sorting with conditions (e.g. cost greater than $20) and building PivotTables to surface patterns
- Building clustered column, stacked column, and line charts, including switching row/column orientation
- Formatting charts for clarity: zeroing the y-axis, removing gridlines and legends, adding axis titles and data labels
- Structuring a single findings slide with a headline takeaway, supporting charts, and highlighted callouts
Best for: Excel users who already know basic formulas and want a concrete, end-to-end model for turning messy campaign data into a one-slide business narrative.
Skip it if: Complete beginners who have not taken the first two parts of the series, or anyone hoping for advanced PivotTable features, DAX, or statistical rigor.