Microsoft Office skills are extremely valuable in today’s job market, across a wide range of industries. The majority of office jobs require knowledge of Microsoft Office programs such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and others. Fortunately, there are numerous free online courses available to help you learn Microsoft Office applications and earn certificates to demonstrate your skills to employers. These online courses allow anyone to develop advanced Office skills from the comfort of their own home, at no cost.
Excel: Beginner to Advanced
Microsoft Excel is probably the most universally useful Office program for the workplace. Companies use Excel for a variety of purposes, including data analysis, accounting, and finance. Excel proficiency almost guarantees employment opportunities in office settings. Fortunately, there are free online Excel courses with certification available.
Microsoft Excel – Excel from Beginner to Advanced, offered by 365 Careers on Udemy, is an excellent free Excel course. This online course includes 26.5 hours of training videos that cover Excel basics, formulas, functions, pivot tables, macros, visualizations, and much more. Best of all, completing the course earns you a certificate of completion, which you can use to verify your new Excel skills on resumes or job applications. This course’s instructor has taught Excel to over 700,000 students and has a 4.6/5 star average rating, so you can be confident that this course will provide valuable skills.
- This free course covers key topics such as Excel basics and creating workbooks.
- Cell formatting and customized styles
- Sorting and Filtering Data
- Excel formulas, such as VLOOKUP and SUMIFS
- Pivot tables, pivot charts, and dashboards.
- Data Analysis Features
- Macro and VBA
This free Udemy course provides premium Excel training that is constantly updated. It’s an excellent way to learn the world’s most popular spreadsheet program while also earning a certificate for employment and promotions.
Master Microsoft Word and Document Creation
Microsoft Word skills are just as important as Excel because they allow for the creation of professional documents, which businesses require all the time. Every day, offices around the world must create reports, memos, letters, manuals, and other documents. The excellent Microsoft Word – Word from Beginner to Advanced course on Udemy will help you master everything from the fundamentals of Word to advanced formatting and customization.
Key Microsoft Word topics covered in this 21.5-hour course include:
Introduction to Word and Basic Typing
- Customize the page layout with headers, footers, and columns.
- Styles, themes, templates, and unique formatting
- Insert tables, charts, smartart, and shapes.
- Mail merge form letter creation
- Reviewing tools like Track Changes
- Macros for automating document creation
- Creating multi-page reports and other lengthy documents.
This free online Word course concludes by teaching you how to create professional resumes using Word to highlight your skills. Completing Microsoft Word – Word from Beginner to Advanced earns you a completion certificate, as do all Udemy courses. This certification validates your strong Word skills, which greatly improves your chances of landing a job or being promoted.
PowerPoint Presentation Mastery
Another important Microsoft Office skill that employers value is the ability to create powerful PowerPoint presentations. Meetings, pitches, lectures, and other presentations are centered on powerful PowerPoint slide decks. Microsoft PowerPoint – Presentation Design and Delivery, which is available for free on Udemy, is an excellent course for developing expert presentation building skills in PowerPoint.
- This course offers 17.5 hours of expert video instruction.
- Learn the fundamentals of PowerPoint, including slides, templates, and inserting media.
- Make visually appealing slide designs with shapes, charts, images, and text boxes.
- Create animated slide transitions and motion effects.
- Create professional presentation templates for reuse.
- Deliver compelling presentations using the best public speaking practices.
Both creating and presenting slide decks require expertise, which this highly rated PowerPoint course provides. You will be able to visually inform, educate, and persuade audiences using Microsoft’s ubiquitous presentation software. The certificate earned completes your new presentation skills for use on resumes and job applications.
Learn Microsoft Office Project Management
Modern offices frequently use advanced software solutions, such as Microsoft Project, to plan and manage organizational projects. Understanding productivity software beyond Word, Excel, and PowerPoint will increase your employability while also enabling businesses to improve operational success through effective project tracking.
A free Udemy course Microsoft Project – MPP Fundamentals with MS Project 2013/2016/2019 provides excellent training for improving project management skills in Microsoft Project. During the 9.5 hours of tutorials, you gain practical experience with Project by:
- Developing project plans with tasks, timelines, assignments, resources, and budgets.
- Optimizing project plans for timely and cost-effective completion
- Monitor active projects and adjust elements as needed.
- Creating insightful project management reports.
- Collaborating with teams through Microsoft Project capabilities
This course’s software proficiency benefits both project managers and team members. The included certificate verifies your ability to use Microsoft Project’s planning and monitoring capabilities for workplace improvement, regardless of your role.
Office 365 Essentials and Team Management
Microsoft Office 365 represents the future of business software by combining Office applications, cloud storage, team messaging, and much more into a single subscription suite. Office workers who understand Office 365 concepts will be in high demand as businesses shift to hosted online services for office productivity solutions instead of traditional on-premises software packages.
The Office 365 Essentials free course on Udemy provides excellent instruction for getting started with cloud-based Office 365, with 11 hours of training videos. Useful content includes information on communication/collaboration apps such as Outlook, OneDrive, SharePoint, Microsoft Teams, and Yammer. Specific lessons allow you to
- Set up Office 365 accounts/licenses and cloud data storage.
- Outlook web app allows you to manage your contacts, calendars, and emails.
- Coordinate with Teams, using channels, conversations, meetings, and file sharing.
- Create SharePoint sites to centralize documents, data, and team resources.
- Adopt cloud services for mobile productivity and telecommuting.
Learning modern platforms such as Office 365 makes you a much more adaptable and capable employee. The final certificate demonstrates cloud-ready Office 365 capabilities for our increasingly distributed digital workforce.
Conclusion
Microsoft Office skills have a high employment potential in almost every industry and office environment. Hiring managers are desperate for candidates who know how to use essential productivity software such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and other Office applications. Fortunately, the free online courses listed above allow anyone to learn popular Microsoft Office programs at a low cost. Completing these courses earns you valuable certificates that verify your Office capabilities, which can help you land jobs, earn raises/promotions, or advance your career.
