u/LisaMay9 - Your post was submitted successfully. Once your problem is solved, reply to the answer(s) saying Solution Verified to close the thread. Follow the submission rules -- particularly 1 and 2. To fix the body, click edit. To fix your title, delete and re-post. Include your Excel version and all other relevant information Failing to follow these steps may result in your post being removed without warning. I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns. More on reddit.com

The web versions of Excel, Word and PowerPoint are free. The don’t have all the features, but depending on what you need it may be enough. More on reddit.com

365 is a subscription. I think what you're thinking of is Excel for Web. There are a handful of versions of Excel these days. Excel for Windows Excel for Mac Excel for Web Excel for iOS Excel for Android Excel for Windows is the most feature complete version of Excel, and it is the version that most people are referring to when they simply say "Excel". Microsoft 365 is a subscription license program that gets you the latest version of Microsoft for Windows or Mac. Excel for Web is free, and also gets mixed up in the 365 branding. It's all horribly confusing, and Microsoft keeps rebranding their online presence, which makes it even harder to follow. Our email is Google Apps hosted, so I'm really familiar with Google Sheets. A lot of our business process is built on top of it. For a little while, I actually preferred it. Google really put in a strong push to make Sheets competitive. Then Microsoft got serious and came back hard. The new array formulas in Excel are a thing of beauty. The spilled range operator is absolutely brilliant. I get really tired of wrapping stuff in ARRAYFORMULA() in Google Sheets when I can just do A1# in Excel. I also really love how Excel allows you to define a lambda function in a cell and simply call it with trailing parenthesis. Contrast this with Google Sheet's named function implementation, and I think Excel is a clear winner. This is before you get into things like Power Pivot and Power Query, which is a whole other layer of capability. There are time series operations you can do in DAX that are simply impossible in Google Apps using functions. These two tools put Excel in another realm, IMO. Where Google Sheets really shines is that it is natively online. Tools like IMPORTRANGE and IMPORTDATA are really incredible. We have some API endpoints in a proprietary web apps that can respond with CSV. I can wrap them in an IMPORTDATA call and very easily sync app data in ad hoc spreadsheets. I can do the same thing with Excel's Power Query, of course, but IMPORTDATA is very convenient. The same with IMPORTRANGE; it's very convenient. Every spreadsheet is just URL. There's never any question of whether the file being referenced was on someone's local drive. There is SharePoint web folders, of course, but... Yeah. SharePoint is still a bit of a sore point for Microsoft apps, IMO. If you're going into data analytics, Excel for Windows including Power Query and Power Pivot are absolute musts. They're ubiquitous in the industry, and they're the most powerful spreadsheet tools you'll find. If you really want to expand your career opportunities, start learning SQL, and pick up a general purpose scripting language like Python. You can use a tool like JupyterLab to explore Python and Pandas (a data analysis library) in an interactive environment. More on reddit.com

You need to find out if the course requires Excel desktop. Excel for web is modeled after Excel desktop, but it is not the same. Personally, I would bet they require Excel desktop. The entire business world relies on the desktop version. If you want to try out Linux, install a virtual machine and try it there first. More on reddit.com