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Are you looking for a fun way to use Excel? Are you looking for some new and exciting project ideas? If so, you have come to the right place!
In this blog post, we will discuss 21 Microsoft Excel projects that are both useful and fun! We will give an overview of each project, and we will provide a link to a tutorial that will help you get started.
So what are you waiting for?
Get started on these Microsoft Excel projects today!
What Are Some Useful and Fun Excel Project Ideas for Practice?
If you are looking for some useful and fun Excel project ideas, here are some you can try:
Project #1: Use Excel to Help with Your Holiday Shopping
Do you find yourself spending hours online searching for the perfect holiday gifts? Do you have a hard time keeping track of what you have purchased and what is left on your list? If so, Excel can help!
Excel is the perfect tool for keeping track of your holiday shopping. With Excel, you can create a list of the people you need to buy gifts for, and you can keep track of what you have purchased and what is left on your list.
You can even set a budget for each person and keep track of how much you have spent.
However, such a project might require some manual data entry when filling up your spreadsheet.
Project #2: Create a Budget Tracker
Are you working on getting your finances in order? If so, you know that creating and sticking to a personal budget is key. Luckily, Excel can help you with that!
There are a ton of different ways that you can use Excel to create a budget tracker. You can find templates online, or you can create your own.
But however you do it, Excel is the perfect tool for keeping track of your income and expenses and making sure that you are sticking to your budget.
You can even use this as part of a larger Excel project management template tool project by combining the relevant expenses made in the project.
Project #3: Use Microsoft Excel to Organize Your Recipes
Do you love to cook? If so, chances are you have a lot of recipes. And if you are like most people, those recipes are probably scattered all over the place.
But with Excel, you can get them all organized in one place!
There are a few different ways that you can use Excel to organize your recipes. You can create a spreadsheet with all of your recipes, or you can use an online template.
Either way, Excel is the perfect tool for keeping all of your recipes organized and easy to find.
This would make a great addition to your Excel portfolio!
Project #4: Make a To-Do List
Are you the type of person who is always forgetting what you need to do? Excel can come in handy to help you with that!
With Excel, you can create a to-do list that will help you keep track of all of the tasks that you need to complete.
There are a few different ways that you can create a to-do list in Excel. You can find templates online, or you can create your own. However, you do it; having a to-do list in Excel is a great way to make sure that you are staying on top of all of your tasks.
Project #5: Use Excel to Track Your Workouts
Are you trying to get in shape? Not to worry, by having a workout tracker for your excel project, you can track your workouts and see your progress over time all within 1 Excel spreadsheet.
There are a few different ways that you can use Excel to track your workouts. You can find templates online, or you can create your own. But however you do it, excel is a great way to track your progress and see how far you have come.
Project #6: Use Excel to Track Your Weight Loss
You can also track your weight loss and see your progress over time if you’re losing weight using just an Excel sheet.
Using formulas and pivot tables in Excel, you’ll be able to track your weight changes over time!
This can be a great excel project to track and see your progress. You may even be able to find templates or tutorials online to help you get started.
Project #7: Use Excel For Managing Projects
Do you have a hard time staying on top of your multiple projects?
Well, creating an Excel project on that might help! This will be a whole project management system made and programmed within Excel.
Some ideas of items you can include in this project:
- Project management dashboard
- Project timeline template
- Project tracker template
- Project management tool
You might want to collect some project data, such as project details and project phases.
Creating such a project would be helpful for those of you aspiring project managers to better understand how to balance and visualize project schedules while developing your skill in Excel.
Project #8: Geo-location Heat Maps
If you’re planning to use Excel for creating data visualizations, a heatmap project might be the one for you.
Some common applications for geo-location heatmaps are:
- Traffic jam analysis
- Weather changes
- Humidity indexes
- City population density
- Income per capita
- Air pollution indexes
In this data visualization project, you’ll need to import longitude and latitude data into your spreadsheet. Subsequently, you’ll have to plot them onto a heatmap to show specific changes in your data.
Project #9: Use Excel to Organize Your Schedule
If you have a busy schedule, it can be hard to keep track of everything that you need to do. But with Excel, you can get everything organized and in one place by creating an Excel schedule template!
With your schedule planned out in an Excel spreadsheet, you’ll get to be your own project manager of your own time.
If you’re going to take this one step further, you can even create a Gantt Chart project template, which can be really useful when organizing a timeline in a project.
Project #10: Use Excel to Track Your Habits
Some of the best Excel projects are those based on what you experience personally.
Do you have some bad habits that you are trying to break?
With your new Excel skills, you can track your habits and see your progress over time.
This can be a good addition for anyone interested in productivity.
Project #11: Use Excel to Help Plan Your Next Vacation
Are you dreaming of your next vacation? If so, you can consider starting a vacation planner using Excel as one of your spreadsheet project ideas!
Using just your basic existing Excel skills, you can keep track of all of the different aspects of your trip, from flights and hotels to rental cars and activities.
Project #12: Use Excel to Track Your Investments
Are you investing in stocks? If so, tracking your progress can be important in assessing your stock portfolio. With Excel, you can track your investments and see how they are performing over time.
With this Excel investment tracker, you can track the stocks you own, their price, and the percentage of change. This can be a great excel project to help you stay on top of your investments and see how they are performing.
Want to go a step further? Consider doing some data analytics in Excel.
Here are some ways:
- Create logistic regression models to predict the stock price
- Point out any outliers using statistical analysis
Through the use of data analytics, you’ll be able to create a unique project that will make a good addition to your portfolio.
Project #13: Use Excel to Track Your Sleep
Do you have trouble sleeping? If so, excel can help! With Excel, you can track your sleep and see how much you are getting over time.
By doing this project in Excel, you can better understand your sleep patterns and work on getting the amount of sleep that you need.
You can use a sleep tracker device or a smartwatch to collect all the needed data points.
Here are some data points to consider:
- Time of sleep
- Length of sleep
- Length of REM sleep
- Time it takes to fall asleep
Once you’ve collected information on your sleep for a few nights, you can choose to import data directly into Excel.
Project #14: Use Excel to Track Your Water Intake
Excel can also be used to see how much water you drink each day. By using this tracker for your next Excel project, you’ll be able to tell which days you’ve been drinking less water and improve your intake!
Although this project might not require advanced Excel capabilities, you’ll still be required to use basic skills.
For example, you should develop data tables to store data about the volume of water intake you have per day.
Project #15: Use Excel to Track Your Reading
Do you read books regularly? Keeping track of reading books can be tough, especially when you’re trying to read a few at the same time.
If that’s you, you can consider a simple Excel tracker to monitor your reading.
You can try adding in the page you stopped at, books you’ve read, and also favorite quotes for each book!
Project #16: Use Excel to Create a Recipe Book
If you love to cook, here’s one of the creative projects you can try – a recipe book! This is a great way to keep all of your favorite recipes in one place.
You can even share your recipe book with friends and family. And if you’re feeling really ambitious, you can even try creating a cookbook using Excel.
Project #17: Use Excel to Track Your TV Shows
If you are a TV junkie, you can use excel to track the shows that you watch. This is a great way to keep track of your favorite shows and see how much you are watching.
You can also use this tracker to see how often you are watching TV. If you find that you are watching too much TV, you can use this tracker to help you cut back.
Project #18: Use Excel to Track Your Steps
Do you use a fitness tracker? If so, you know that it is important to track your steps. With Excel, you can track your steps and see your progress over time.
You can also use this tracker to see how active you are each day. If you find that you are not getting enough exercise, you can use this tracker to help you get more active.
Project #19: Simple Game Development in Excel
Yes, you heard that right! You can even create simple games from within Excel. If you’re looking for a fun Excel idea to share with your friends, creating a game in Excel is a project for you.
Some simple games include:
- 2048
- Scrabble
- Sudoku
Although these projects might not be as fancy as web games or games from mobile operating systems, you’ll still be able to learn much about the visual aspects of Excel.
Project #20: Attendance Tracking Project
Going beyond just a simple Excel attendance-tracking sheet, you can work on a full project to manage attendance.
Firstly, you’ll need to create a simple checklist of names and some checkboxes. Once you have the basics for all of that filled up, you should create a timeline of attendance to view attendance changes over time.
I would also suggest going beyond that and creating a simple interactive dashboard with key performance metrics. Data projects like these are extremely common in the workplace, and an Excel project on this is a good option to consider too!
Project #21: Real Estate Excel Tracker
Are you interested in property prices in your area? Or are you thinking of buying a new property? Why not create a simple tracking within Excel to compare prices and fluctuations?
With your own real estate tracker, you can compile all the prices within a specific district and analyze for changes.
Project #22: Plant Growth Tracker
If you’re a plant enthusiast or if you just happen to own some plants in your backyard, you can consider making it into an Excel project too.
Wrapping Up
Excel is a powerful tool that can be used for a variety of projects. Whether you’re trying to stay on track with your goals, create your own budget tracker, or organize your schedule, Excel can help!
And these are just a few of the many Excel project ideas that you can use for your next project. So what are you waiting for? Get started today!
Thanks for reading!
My Favorite Learning Resources:
My Recommended Learning Platforms!
Learning Platform | What’s Good About the Platform? | |
---|---|---|
1 | Coursera | Certificates are offered by popular learning institutes and companies like Google & IBM |
2 | DataCamp | Comes with an integrated coding platform, great for beginners! |
3 | Pluralsight | Strong focus on data skills, taught by industry experts |
4 | Stratascratch | Learn faster by doing real interview coding practices for data science |
5 | Udacity | High-quality, comprehensive courses |
My Recommended Online Courses + Books!
Topic | Online Courses | Books | |
---|---|---|---|
1 | Data Analytics | Google Data Analytics Professional Certificate | – |
2 | Data Science | IBM Data Science Professional Certificate | – |
3 | Excel | Excel Skills for Business Specialization | – |
4 | Python | Python for Everybody Specialization | Python for Data Analysis |
5 | SQL | Introduction to SQL | SQL: The Ultimate Beginners Guide: Learn SQL Today |
6 | Tableau | Data Visualization with Tableau | Practical Tableau |
7 | Power BI | Getting Started with Power BI Desktop | Beginning Microsoft Power BI |
8 | R Programming | Data Science: Foundations using R Specialization | Learning R |
9 | Data Visualization | – | Big Book of Dashboards |