Data Smart: Using Data Science to Transform Information into Insight

As others have noted, many data scientists work in Excel. This book, which teaches data science, does just that:

"Data Smart: Using Data Science to Transform Information into Insight" by by John W. Foreman

https://www.amazon.com/Data-Smart-Science-Transform-Informat...

This is likely the quickest way to start.

The first chapter of "Data Smart" (https://www.amazon.ca/Data-Smart-Science-Transform-Informati...) gets into some more advanced but practical tasks in Excel. The material is accessible to the beginner and assumes little prior knowledge of Excel.

Can't answer whether to learn R or Julia, but for a more general education on Data Science, this book might be a really good fit for you:

Data Smart: Using Data Science to Transform Information into Insight

https://www.amazon.com/Data-Smart-Science-Transform-Informat...

All the work is done in Excel. I enjoyed the book quite a bit. Author is Chief Data Scientist for MailChimp.

Yeah, google drive spreadsheets are only good for sharing fairly static small sheets. I just wrote an intro data science book that uses spreadsheets to demonstrate certain algorithms (simplex, kmeans, modularity, LOF, etc.) And in the book I warn the reader to not use Drive. Slow, clunky, and the Solver implementation is garbage. Plug:

http://www.amazon.com/Data-Smart-Science-Transform-Informati...

I recently read a book called "Data Smart" [1], where the author does k-means and prediction algorithms literally in Excel. This was quite eye opening as the view to ML is not so enigmatic to enter. However, the translation of your data into a format/model to run ML is another challenge.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Data-Smart-Science-Transform-Informati...