Best Microsoft Office Courses Online

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Being adept at using Microsoft Office is one of the most crucial skills and in-demand skills for professionals and students alike. You’ll use it in almost every professional and academic setting, whether you are in an office, classroom, or working or studying from home.

You’ll definitely wan to know how to make the most of this popular and powerful program.

Whether you are just learning the basics, or want to know how to show off using advanced features, there are a wide array of online courses available for you to learn from.

To save you valuable time, we’ve narrowed down the list of online Microsoft Office courses to the “best of” in each of these popular categories.

Best Microsoft Office Courses Online

1. Easy Automation with Microsoft Office to Speed Up Tasks (Best Overall)

best microsoft office course

What we liked: This class unlocks the information that most of us really want to know – how to use Microsoft Office to make our everyday work, academic, and/or personal lives easier and more efficient.

Pros:

  • Takes the average Microsoft Office user who has a pretty basic working knowledge of some of the Microsoft Office programs, and advances them to a much more productive and efficient level.
  • Focuses on time-saving techniques.
  • Teaches students how to automate many tasks.
  • Well-organized and hands-on lessons.
  • Learn quickly, with the entire course being less than one hour long.

Cons:

  • The audio quality is not the best.

2. Microsoft Office Essential Skills (Best for Beginners)

What we liked: This course focuses on the Microsoft Office knowledge that employers most expect their employees to have.

Pros:

  • Popular and highly rated course taught by a certified Microsoft Trainer.
  • Teaches the essential skills for Microsoft Word, Outlook, Excel, and PowerPoint.

Cons:

  • Although the course is about as efficient as can be, given all of the information covered, it does still take 3 hours and 35 minutes altogether.
  • The instructor uses an older version of Microsoft Office (2010), so there are some differences between his version and the newest versions.

Overall, this is still one of the best and most efficient online introductory courses for the suite of Microsoft Office products. The certified Microsoft Trainer teaches you step by step how to master the most important basics in the most-used Microsoft Office programs.

3. Office 365 New Features (Microsoft 365) (Best for Intermediate)

What we liked: This straightforward and easy-to-follow course is the perfect next step for the many people who have been using Microsoft Office for a while, but now need to learn about all of the features in the newer version.

Pros:

  • Greatly increase your ability to leverage the new technology within the Microsoft 365, including using natural language in Excel, language translation in Outlook emails, using voice to create a Word draft, and more.
  • Provides updates and tips on Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and Outlook, as well as other new apps within the Microsoft Office platform.
  • The course is updated regularly.

Cons:

  • It does take a bit of time, at about 1 hour and 44 minutes, though that is not very long considering all that is taught.

Don’t just guess and check your way through the new Microsoft Office 365. Taking this course instead will help you be tremendously more proficient and impressive to your supervisors, coworkers, and clients.

4. Data Processing and Analysis with Excel (Best for Advanced)

What we liked: Excel can be utilized for far more powerful purposes than most people realize. This course teaches even long-time Excel users how to use the full capabilities of this program.

Pros:

  • Great for intermediate users who want to become advanced, or advanced users who want to increase skills further.
  • Focuses on using Excel for advanced techniques in data analysis and statistics.
  • Taught by Beth Prince-Bradbury, the Associate Director for Institutional Research, Data and Analytics at the Rochester Institute of Technology.
  • You can audit the course for free, or earn a sharable certificate with the paid version.

Cons:

  • The course is taught using Microsoft Excel 2016, so there are likely to have been some updates compared to what is taught in the class.
  • Prepare to spend approximately 6-8 hours per week for 4 weeks to complete the material and lessons. It is self-paced, however, so you may be able to go faster or take more time, if needed.

5. Microsoft Word 2016 – Word Bootcamp – Zero to Hero Training (Best for Microsoft Word)

What we liked: This course will turn even a complete beginner into an expert at using Microsoft Word, and will be able to improve intermediate-level users, as well.

Pros:

  • Although beginners can certainly take this class, even long-time users will benefit and learn new skills and techniques from this course.
  • Students will learn foundational and practical skills, as well as advanced and sophisticated techniques.
  • The teacher is very engaging.
  • The lessons are clear and well-organized.
  • Hands-on lessons for a wide variety of in-demand tasks and skills that are sure to impress your supervisors, clients, colleagues, and/or professors.

Cons:

  • The course is a bit time-intensive, with 3 hours and 19 minutes of recorded lessons.

6. Microsoft Excel 2016 Bootcamp – Zero to Hero Training (Best for Excel)

What we liked: Like the “Zero to Hero” Word course above, this online course will turn even a complete novice into an expert, and can advance moderately skilled users quite a bit, too.

Pros:

  • Accessible and immensely useful for beginners as well as intermediate-level users.
  • Great variety of hands-on, practical projects and lessons.
  • The course covers many of the most popular and frequently-needed tasks, as well as many that are hugely useful that you may not have even known you could do.
  • Fun teacher with clear and helpful lessons.

Cons:

  • Almost two hours of recorded lessons, though that is really pretty efficient for the amount of information that is shared.

7. PowerPoint2021 Essential Training (Office 2021/LTSC) (Best for PowerPoint)

What we liked: Perfect course for either beginners, intermediate users, or people who would like a review or refresh for how to use PowerPoint to create more engaging and impactful presentations.

Pros:

  • Well-organized class focuses on the most useful features for creating powerful and impressive presentations.
  • Takes students step-by-step.
  • Includes enough information so that beginners can understand, but also keeps intermediate-level users interested and learning, as well.
  • Students who complete the course earn a shareable LinkedIn Learning certificate.

Cons:

  • Users looking for the most sophisticated techniques might want to look for a more advanced course.

8. Learn Microsoft Access – The Complete Microsoft Access Course for Beginners (Best for OneNote)

What we liked: This course teaches students exactly what is needed for making the most of the OneNote program.

Pros:

  • Very efficient course at only 48 minutes long.
  • Clear, well-organized, and helpful lessons.
  • Allows you to get started using OneNote as soon as possible to make organizing your notes and sources incredibly more efficient and organized.

Cons:

  • At times, the course actually goes a bit too fast, but you can always pause and rewind it if you need to.

9 Learn Microsoft Access – The Complete Microsoft Access Course for Beginners (Best for Microsoft Access)

What we liked: Even if you have dabbled in Microsoft Access, this clear and well-organized, in-depth course most likely has even more helpful information that you can put to use on the powerful database program, Microsoft Access.

Pros:

  • Breaks down a very complex and powerful program into easy-to-digest lessons.
  • Hands on learning so that you can immediately put the lesson into practice.
  • The course starts with the basic foundations and works up to more advanced techniques.
  • Very thorough course.

Cons:

  • Being this in-depth does take time. Be prepared to set aside at least six hours and 13 minutes just to follow along with the videos, plus some time to practice what is taught.

Don’t be deceived by the word “beginner” in this course’s title. Microsoft Access is a powerful database program within Microsoft Access that is typically used by people and organizations whose needs exceed Excel’s capabilities.

More courses:

Best Ways to Learn Microsoft Office for Free

You don’t necessarily need to pay money to learn how to use the powerful features of Microsoft Office. Amazingly, many of the courses listed above either have a free option, or at least a free trial period. The free trial period is 30 days for many online learning forums, which is more than enough time to complete most of these courses.

In addition to the free option or free trial period for the courses listed above, there are also tutorials on YouTube and some free courses offered by Microsoft directly.

On YouTube, you can choose from an extremely quick 15.5-minute Introduction to Microsoft Office, here, or spend 9 hours watching the “Microsoft Office Mega Course”, here, with many other options in between. While they are free, be prepared for ads and pop-ups.

You can also access a comprehensive set of Microsoft Office (365) tutorials directly from Microsoft, here. These are made by the creators of Microsoft Office and so are an excellent reference for anybody interested in learning about these programs.

Microsoft Office Courses – Best Online Options

Your time is valuable, so choosing from our curated list of the “best of” Microsoft Office courses will allow you to learn the most important Microsoft Office skills most efficiently, whatever your level, and whether you are focusing on one program or all of them.

 

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