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