Practice makes Perfect.
When you learn about new Excel formula, you would absolutely need resources to help you consolidate this new knowledge, and to apply it to real-life, tangible examples that you can think deeper as to the meaning of the formula you used.
Follow our Editor’s Pick for the top 5 datasets to practice Excel!
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Stock Market Data
Available at: Get Share Historical Data // Yahoo! Finance
A primary source of data to practice your Excel skills is stock market data, which is anything but scarce in the web! With some luck you might be able to earn some money by looking at the stock trading volume/price and constructing your own technical indicators too!
Yahoo! Finance offers free downloads for historical stock trading data if you type in each of your stock symbols individually, and navigate to the “Historical Data” tab. Alternatively, try out our “Get Share Historical Data” Excel add-in which gives you the flexibility to download data for many years for multiple stocks simultaneously, all with one button-click!
U.S. Census Data
Available at: Kaggle - US Census Demographic Data
Naturally we also like census data, which we are most familiar with in our daily encounter. The U.S. Census data offered in Kaggle is one of your best bet to start looking at applying your new-found Excel skills to real-life data, such as compare and contrast the average life expectancy of different ethnicity group, in different cities etc.
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Sports Event
Available at: FiveThirtyEight Data
Are you are football fan? If so, then the Sports dataset offered by FiveThirtyEight might be of interest to you! FiveThirtyEight offers you with sports event prediction tables that are free to download, and the tables provide not only valuable insights to the upcoming sport events, but also a good chance to practice filtering/slicing data in Excel!
Social Engineering
Available at: BuzzFeed Github Repo
Looking to get your hands dirty with social engineering data, showing how different news topic engage with their audience and potentially develop a good marketing strategy for your online brand? Look no further than the BuzzFeed Data and Analyses datasets. BuzzFeed may not be your most credible source of news digest, but data insight is certainly something to look at, especially if you are an online marketer or someone who is interested in learning how social media works!
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Google Search Results
Available at: Google Trends
Last but not least, we mustn’t complete our discussion without a honorary mention to the Google Search results dataset! If you are a trendy person and want to know what your neighbours and peers are discussing, Google Trends might be your best buddy to stay abreast! It also allows you to download stuff like the trend and demographics of the people who searched for a particular keyword over time!
Final Words
We hope you enjoy the vast resources online available for your Excel studies! Feel free to drop us an email or comment below if you find anything interesting while exploring the datasets, or if you would like to know if there’s a way to write good Excel formula to anaylze these data! Stay tuned!
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