Excel for Analysts: Formulas, Pivots & Power Query
Signature Course No. 114 — A Signature AI Socratic Coaching Course.
A New Kind of Learning
Socratic coaching, delivered by an agentic AI coach.
Not a course you watch. An AI coach you work with.
The Lighthouse Coach begins by discovering how you think about the subject, teaches what is missing, and gives you realistic practice before asking you to prove that you can use it. You may test out of concepts you already understand, while capstones turn the learning into a practical plan, decision, conversation, or other real-world result.
The curriculum is deliberately authored; the AI delivers it through coaching. It is not an AI randomly generating lessons.
A coach that teaches by asking — not by lecturing
The Lighthouse Coach is an AI Socratic coach built on Cognosco Learning's Excel for Analysts: Formulas, Pivots & Power Query course, in the Data, Operations & Software category. It does not play videos at you.
It holds a conversation: it asks you a question, listens to your answer, names the misconception it hears, affirms what you got right, and asks the next question — the way a great coach works in the room. You work in your own spreadsheet alongside the Coach throughout: the Coach teaches and questions, you build, and what you build is what gets checked.
This is the course for working analysts and reporting staff, graduates of Excel Without the Headache or readers with equivalent everyday fluency, operations, finance, sales, and service staff who have become the local spreadsheet expert by accident, anyone who inherits analyst workbooks, and organizations whose decisions rest on recurring Excel reports.
It works in the order the work itself runs: first, Module 1 — The Analyst's Formula Toolkit: Tables, Lookups, and Conditional Answers — work through Concepts 1–9, finishing with The Harbor Calculation Sheet; then, Module 2 — Summaries, Pipelines, and Workbooks That Survive Handover — work through Concepts 10–18, finishing with The Harbor Analyst Report.
You finish by proving the whole course — in The Harbor Calculation Sheet and in The Harbor Analyst Report. You can type your answers, or talk out loud: the Voice Coach speaks its questions and listens to your spoken replies, hands-free. The course is self-paced and always on — roughly 30 minutes per concept, about 9 hours in full, taken in as many sittings as you like. Learners who already know the material can test out concept by concept.
This course teaches the modern tool and the durable tool, and says which is which. One small running dataset carries the whole book, and every result claimed from it can be checked by hand. Nothing in these pages is presented as a quotation from an earlier Cognosco text, and nothing is copied from any marketplace course, tutorial library, or other publisher.
Power Query is taught here as an analyst's cleaning and reshaping tool, not as a substitute for judgment. Reconciliation is not a final step — it is the method. One home for every fact, one method for every repeat.
Silent failure is the analyst's real enemy, because a silent failure looks exactly like a correct answer until someone acts on it. If a figure in your own build differs, the figure is wrong, not the controls — find the difference before moving on.
This course carries no certification claim from Microsoft and no examination-preparation claim; Microsoft is named only as the maker of Excel.
Both capstones produce real artifacts — a finished calculation sheet that can prove its own figures in a pricing review, and an auditable analyst workbook, reconciled and documented, ready to hand to a bank or a customer — not just ideas about analysis.
This is the one hundred and fourteenth course in The Lighthouse Signature Series — the online counterpart to the one-day, in-person learning Cognosco Learning has delivered since 2002.
Course Facts
One full concept, coached end to end — free: verify your email and we’ll send you a link to start.
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Diagnose → Learn & Practice → Prove → Capstone
Every learner moves through the same discipline a Cognosco instructor would insist on in the room.
Diagnose
The Coach starts where the course starts: with the table, not the total. An analyst formula is not finished when it returns a number. It is finished when it still returns the right number after the data grows, the price changes, and someone else sorts the sheet. Every concept opens with three questions that locate where you actually stand, and your answers shape how deeply the Coach works the concept with you. Everyone begins with Module 1 — no skipping the foundations you only think you have.
Learn & Practice
Work each concept in conversation with the Coach — spoken or written — then practice it against realistic situations until it holds up.
Prove
Every concept ends in proof: answer the check cold and demonstrate the skill. Know it already? Test out and take credit immediately.
Capstone
Finish with two capstones — The Harbor Calculation Sheet for Module 1 and The Harbor Analyst Report for Module 2 — that pull the whole course together, and earn the certificate.
What You'll Learn
Analyst work begins where everyday spreadsheet work ends. The list is no longer six rows you can hold in your head. It arrives from another system, it grows every week, it contains spellings that almost match, dates stored as text, prices held on a different sheet, and questions that change the moment you answer the first one: total it by region, then by month, then show each region's share, then explain why March moved.
This course teaches that work in order.
First, formulas that are built to last — structured references that expand with a table, lookups that state what happens when a value is missing, conditional aggregation that answers a precise question in one line, and text and date logic that turns messy fields into groupable facts.
Second, summaries and pipelines — PivotTables grouped and sliced properly, PivotCharts drawn from reconciled summaries, and Power Query steps that clean imported data the same way every time instead of by hand every Monday. Last, protection — validation that keeps bad values out, checks that catch wrong values early, and workbook design that lets a second person follow every figure back to its source. By the end you will be able to take a small, messy, growing body of records and produce an analysis you have reconciled, explained, and made safe to hand over.
What you will learn
- Build analyst formulas with Tables, structured references, and the lookup family used honestly
- Answer precise questions with conditional aggregation, logic, and text and date functions
- Summarize and present analysis with PivotTables, grouping, slicers, calculated fields, and PivotCharts
- Clean, combine, and reshape imported data with Power Query — and protect the result with validation and audit-ready workbook design
Everything in the course
- All 18 concepts of Excel for Analysts: Formulas, Pivots & Power Query, in 2 modules
- A starting-point check first — the Coach finds where you actually stand before teaching
- Learn, Practice, Prove for every concept — no passive video watching
- A test-out on every concept: prove you know it and move on
- The Voice Coach: talk with the Coach out loud — it speaks, listens, and replies
- A personal Learner Record of your work across the course
- Two capstone exercises: The Harbor Calculation Sheet and The Harbor Analyst Report
- A printable session summary whenever you pause
- The Lighthouse Coach completion certificate (Signature Series)
- Your progress is saved as you go — stop anytime, resume where you left off
Built for the person the questions land on
Excel for Analysts: Formulas, Pivots & Power Query is for working analysts and reporting staff — people whose job is to answer questions from data held in Excel, on a deadline, for readers who will act on the answer, graduates of Excel Without the Headache, or readers with equivalent everyday fluency, operations, finance, sales, and service staff who have become the local spreadsheet expert by accident, anyone who inherits analyst workbooks — files full of hard-coded totals, lookups nobody dares to touch, and pivot summaries nobody can reconcile to the source,
and organizations whose decisions rest on recurring Excel reports — weekly sales, monthly operations, quarterly reviews.
This course teaches the modern tool and the durable tool, and says which is which. One small running dataset carries the whole book, and every result claimed from it can be checked by hand. Reconciliation is not a final step — it is the method. This is a Data, Operations & Software course.
It assumes everyday spreadsheet fluency of the kind taught in No. 103, a computer running a current desktop version of Microsoft Excel, and willingness to build every example yourself. Power Query and PivotTables are taught in Excel; the formula craft in Module 1 transfers widely, and the book says plainly where a feature is Excel-specific.
You do not need statistics beyond averages and shares, and you do not need any programming experience.
Prefer to learn live and in person? The same material anchors Cognosco's one-day programs — browse the in-person catalog.
Start with The Harbor Calculation Sheet
$195 — introductory price. One payment. No subscription, no password to manage.
Here is exactly what happens when you enroll:
- Pay securely with Stripe — you are taken straight into the course
- Create your learner profile and begin the Module 1 starting-point check
- Save the access key you are given — it restores your enrollment on any device
- Learn at your pace; your progress is stored in your browser on your device
For the full voice experience, use Chrome and allow the microphone when asked. Typing your answers works everywhere, all the time. Questions before you enroll? Email hello@cognoscolearning.com.
More Signature Courses are coming
Excel for Analysts: Formulas, Pivots & Power Query is Signature Course No. 114. Leave your email and we'll send you news of future Signature Courses and Lighthouse updates as they are announced — nothing else.