Excel Campus vs Chandoo: which learning site is right for you?
Watch alongside this article
Public YouTube resources matched to this article's topic, functions, and practice goal.
Excel for Beginners - The Complete Course
Technology for Teachers and Students
Open on YouTube (opens in a new tab)
Inside Excel: Beginner to Advanced in One 5-Hour Course
Simon Sez IT
Open on YouTube (opens in a new tab)
How to use Copilot in Excel - The Complete Beginners Course
Teacher's Tech
Open on YouTube (opens in a new tab)Excel Campus (Jon Acampora) and Chandoo.org (Purna Duggirala) are two of the most respected independent Excel learning sites. Both have been publishing for over a decade and cover professional-level topics, but their style and focus differ.
Excel Campus
Excel Campus specialises in automation, VBA, and Power Query — the layer of Excel that saves time on repetitive tasks. Jon Acampora’s tutorials tend to be systematic: he builds toward a complete, reusable solution rather than answering a single narrow question. The free content is deep, and the paid courses are project-based.
Excel Campus is the better fit if you work in finance or accounting and want to learn how to automate reports, build clean VBA macros, or set up Power Query pipelines.
Chandoo.org
Chandoo has a broader scope and a large archive of articles spanning formulas, charts, dashboards, and data analysis. The style is approachable — Chandoo writes for people who are proficient but want to think more clearly about what they are building, not just how. The forum is active and the community tutorials cover unusual use cases.
Chandoo is the better fit if you want to improve at data visualization and dashboards, work through formula problems with community input, or browse a wide range of solved examples.
The short version
If your goal is automation and VBA: Excel Campus. If your goal is better analysis, charting, or dashboards: Chandoo. Both are worth following if you use Excel professionally.
Go deeper with this skill
Build a confident foundation by practicing navigation, data entry, formatting, references, and simple calculations together. For this article, the goal is to practice: Comparing Excel Campus and Chandoo.org as Excel learning resources — content style, course depth, and who each one serves best.
Practice workbook setup
Create a starter workbook with one sheet for raw practice data, one sheet for formatted output, and one sheet for notes.
Practice workflow
- Enter a small table manually so you practice rows, columns, headers, and basic formatting.
- Use simple formulas such as totals, averages, and percentages before moving to advanced functions.
- Practice copying formulas while watching how relative and absolute references change.
- Format the result for readability, then remove any formatting that does not help the reader.
Quality checks
- Numbers are stored as numbers, dates as dates, and labels as text.
- Formulas copy correctly down the table without broken references.
- The final sheet can be understood without needing the practice notes.
Common mistakes
- Typing numbers with currency symbols or spaces that turn them into text.
- Copying a formula before checking whether references should stay fixed.
- Using formatting to cover unclear labels or inconsistent structure.
Next actions
- Rebuild the same workbook without looking at the tutorial.
- Turn the range into a table and repeat the formulas using table headers.
Formula focus: even if this workflow is not formula-heavy, add one check cell that confirms the final output still matches the source data.
