While Blade Hunter made a good point about whether you are a book learner or a practical learner I can give you a good answer to your question with regards to Excel and Finance...
For sales forecasts, all you need is a good conceptual understanding of what you are modeling and rudimentary Excel. What I mean about a good conceptual understanding is that you know the metrics that are driving your sales. I can do a basic sales forecasts without using any special formulas and just SUM(). Not something I would do though
Okay, using Excel for business plans is another story. Frankly, you do not use Excel to do Business Plans. You use Excel to generate your financials and Sources and Uses that will go into your business plan (sorry for being anal, just the way things really are though).
This is not so straight forward and I will explain in just a bit.
What you need to know:
1) Fundamental understanding of the three financial statements and how they relate to each other: Income Statement, Balance Sheet, and Cashflow.
2) Knowledge of Excel: Absolute and relative references, SUM(), VLOOKUP()/HLOOKUP() [and/or INDEX()/MATCH()], EDATE(), IF(), AND(), OR(), OFFSET(), ISNA(), IRR() and that's about it. Those are the functions I consider essential to anyone doing financial statements. Least off the top of my head.
Things that are nice to know are stuff like styles.
Something I will tell you that I tell everyone (thought no one really listens) is that if you REALLY want to speed up the way you use Excel do NOT use the mouse. Learn to use the keyboard for most everything. I'm serious. One of the best investments you can make that will save you time, allow you to do more, is to learn to use Excel without a mouse.
Okay, after that little tangent....
Creating the financials is mostly straightforward but you should follow good model design. Raw/historic data should be placed in one spot. You want to try and put the metrics that are going to drive your model in one area. Sometimes that is not just as feasble as it sounds, so at least make them stand out. For example color hard inputs BLUE or RED while formulas etc... are black. Be cognizant that most printers are black and white so do not choose a light color for your hard inputs.
Be consistent. All formulas in one row should be the same so you can just copy them over each other. The only exception would be the first column. For example, if you grow your revenues from year 2008 to 2013 at 10% and then from 2013 onward at 5%, you should not hard encode 10% and 5% in your formula. You should have a separate row for revenue growth as a hard input and revenues should be a formula driven off the growth row. Confused? Hope it is understandable enough.
WHAT IS NOT STRAIGHTFORWARD:
If you understand the relationship of Financial Statements and what drives each line item, then you can see that it can be circular. For example, interest earned on cash increases your cash. I know many (if not most) create Financial Statements with circular references. To me this is bad modeling because if you end up doing large financial structuring, tracking one of these runaway circular references can be a pain in the ***. Most (if not all) models can be made without circular references. Just need to think objectively. If you took cash from the previous period and earned interest off it instead of this periods cash, will that have a big impact on the bottom line? In almost all industries not (except for Banks and some Insurance companies) and that removes that circular reference from your model...
The other thing that throws most people is Long Term liabilities. Most simple models it doesn't matter but for some models it does. What I'm talking about is that long term debt converts to short term debt when it's maturity changes from greater than 1-year to less than 1-year. Easy concept, but it's not so straight forward to model. If you do not need to worry about this things are very easy. If you have indentures with specific metrics/ratios etc... then you need to follow accounting rules and break it out so your long term and short term liabilities are 100% accounting correct. It's not that hard, just a pain when most of financial modeling is very straight forward. Usually you have to break debt out into a separate area and model it and then bring the results in your financial statement.
But if you are limiting yourself to business plans it's a lot more straight forward because you can get away with not breaking out the current portion of long term debt without having a real effect on your analysis.
Blade Hunter is right in one respect, you really learn by doing.
If you are really thinking about spending $2,500 for a course... You might want to think about talking with some of your peers. Gather a few together and contact me. It'll be a lot cheaper for you personally! I can setup a number of tasks/models for you to do that will teach you what you need to learn. I'll rate your performance and I'll do the tasks as well so when I give you my comments, you'll also get my version and a write-up on what I did and why I did it.
Good luck to you.
