Data analysis course for beginners: the 10 best in 2026

Best for beginners who want only the job-ready essentials. In three sections it covers Excel lookups, pivot tables, charts and functions, building visualizations and automating cleaning with Power Query in Power BI, and writing SQL queries, with a quiz at the end of each section.

It has 4.5 stars from 751 reviews and more than 2,600 students. It runs about four and a half hours with 15 quizzes and was last updated in December 2025.

Best for committed beginners who want every major tool in one long program. It covers generative AI tools, Python with Pandas, NumPy and Matplotlib, exploratory data analysis, statistics, SQL, Excel, Power BI and Tableau, and Microsoft Fabric with lakehouses and KQL.

It has 4.4 stars from more than 4,000 reviews and more than 41,000 students. At about 68 hours with 11 quizzes it is the longest course here, which is why we lowered it slightly. It was updated in September 2026.

Best for business users with Microsoft 365 Copilot who want results fast. It shows how to prepare data, create and explain formulas, build key metrics, summaries and charts, analyze data structure, classify free-text comments and clean messy files by asking questions in plain English, with five projects on sales, finance and HR data.

It has 4.7 stars from 390 reviews and more than 2,000 students. It runs about three hours, the shortest course here, and was updated in September 2026.

Best for beginners who want to become strong Excel analysts. It covers formulas, cell referencing, data cleaning and validation, lookups including XLOOKUP, sorting and conditional formatting, charts and dashboards, pivot tables and Power Pivot, Power Query, what-if analysis, macros and VBA, and Excel Copilot.

It has 4.5 stars from 541 reviews and more than 2,600 students. It runs about 16 hours with 25 quizzes and 43 resources, and was updated in October 2026.

Best for beginners who want to try the main analyst tools side by side. It covers SQL fundamentals, Tableau, Power BI, Excel for analysis, using ChatGPT as a data analyst and statistics for data analysis, with hands-on projects for a portfolio.

It has 4.6 stars from more than 7,000 reviews and more than 42,000 students. It runs about 15 hours with nine quizzes and 51 resources, and was updated in July 2026. Power BI needs a Windows computer.

Best for beginners who want to query databases quickly. Maven Analytics makes you the new owner of a DVD rental shop and teaches SQL in MySQL Workbench, from database fundamentals and single-table queries to joins across multiple tables, with a mid-course and a final project.

It has 4.7 stars from more than 10,700 reviews and more than 60,000 students. It runs about four and a half hours with four quizzes and was updated in June 2026.

Best for beginners who want to learn Python for analysis through a project. Maven Analytics casts you as an intern at a ski shop and covers Jupyter Notebooks, data types, variables, numbers and strings, conditional logic, lists and tuples, loops, dictionaries and sets, functions, and manipulating Excel sheets with Python.

It has 4.7 stars from more than 2,400 reviews and more than 15,000 students. It runs about 11 hours with 48 quizzes and was updated in October 2026.

Best for beginners who want Excel, SQL and Python in one course. Abhishek and Pukhraj cover Excel lookups, sorting, filtering and charts, Copilot in Excel, Power Query, Power Pivot and DAX, SQL with GROUP BY, joins and subqueries, and linear regression to solve business problems.

It has 4.6 stars from more than 8,000 reviews and more than 86,000 students. It runs about 24 hours with 81 quizzes and 204 resources, and was updated in September 2026.

Best for complete beginners who want a structured path to a data analyst job. It covers data analytics theory, basic and advanced Python, NumPy, Pandas, text files, data collection, cleaning, preprocessing and visualization, ending with a final practical example, with a strong focus on working with raw, messy data.

It has 4.5 stars from more than 25,000 reviews and more than 178,000 students. It runs about 21 hours with 369 quizzes, by far the most on this list, and 154 resources, and was updated in August 2026.