Learn Excel or SQL With a Free AI Tutor: 30-Day Plan for €0

Updated: November 2026 · Prices checked: November 2026

Excel and SQL are the two skills that show up in more job ads than any AI tool. Most people try a video course, watch three lessons and stop. Learning works when you practise every day with instant feedback, and a free AI tutor gives you exactly that for €0. Below is a 30-day plan with the prompts.

What you save

The maths: DataCamp Premium at its $28 list price billed yearly is $336, about €289 a year. Many people use it for a month or two. The free route costs €0. If you later want a certificate for your CV, you can still pay for one course, knowing you will finish it.

Setup: tutor plus a practice tool

1. Pick Excel or SQL first, not both. Office work, reports, budgets: Excel. Data, online shops, analytics jobs: SQL. Excel first if you are unsure.
2. Open the practice tool. Excel: sign in at office.com with a free Microsoft account and open Excel, or use Google Sheets. SQL: install DB Browser for SQLite from sqlitebrowser.org, or open the BigQuery sandbox in the Google Cloud console.
3. Create one chat called “Excel tutor” or “SQL tutor”. Keep the whole course in it, so the AI sees what you already learned. In ChatGPT, a Project keeps it tidy.
4. Paste the tutor prompt below once. Then each day just write “Day 7”.

The tutor prompt

You are my tutor for [Excel / SQL]. I am a complete beginner.
I use [Excel for the web / Google Sheets / SQLite / BigQuery].
Each day when I write "Day N":
1. Explain one new idea in under 150 words, with one example.
2. Give me a small fake dataset I can paste (max 15 rows).
3. Give me 3 tasks, easy to hard. Do NOT show the answers.
4. When I paste my answers, check them, explain each mistake,
   and give me one extra task on what I got wrong.
Speak simply. Never do the task for me unless I write "show me".

The key line is the last one. A tutor that gives answers is a search engine. You learn by typing, failing and fixing. The method behind this kind of prompt is in our guide to AI prompts that work.

The 30-day plan

30–45 minutes a day. Days 7, 14, 21 and 28 are mini projects: ask the tutor for “a realistic small business dataset and a question my boss would ask”.

Day 30 is a test. Ask: “Give me a 10-task exam on everything we covered. Grade me out of 10 and list my three weakest topics.” Then spend the next week only on those three.

Two habits make the plan stick:

• Explain it back. Once a week, write: “I will explain pivot tables to you as if you were my colleague. Correct me.” If you cannot explain it, you have not learned it yet.
• Use your own work. From week 3, bring a real task from your job, with fake numbers in the same shape. That is when Excel stops being a course and starts saving you hours.

When you are past the basics, our hack on letting AI write your Excel and Sheets formulas shows how to use AI as a helper at work. And cleaning a messy customer spreadsheet with AI makes a great week-4 project.

Limits and traps

• The AI makes mistakes too. It can mark a correct answer wrong or invent a function your version does not have. Your practice tool is the judge: if the formula or query runs and the result is right, you are right. See our routine for checking AI answers.
• Version differences. Excel for the web has fewer features than desktop Excel. SQL also differs between SQLite, BigQuery, MySQL and others. Tell the tutor which one you use.
• Free caps. A long session with many pasted tables can hit a free chat’s usage limit. Keep datasets small.
• No real data. Never paste your employer’s customer lists or salaries to “practise”. Ask the AI to fake data in the same shape. Our list of what never to share with AI chatbots explains why.
• BigQuery sandbox limits. Google’s docs say some features are not included and storage is capped at 10 GiB. That is plenty for learning, not for real work.

When to pay instead: if your employer wants a recognised certificate, or you need a structured path with graded projects, a paid course is worth it after you finish these 30 days. Our free vs paid AI maths applies to learning tools too: pay only for what you will use every week.

Read also: Run AI Offline on Your Phone for €0: What Actually Works · Practise a Job Interview With AI Voice Mode for €0 · Weekly Meal Plan and Shopping List on a Budget With AI for €0

Sources: Microsoft: Excel for the web · Microsoft: free web apps vs subscription · DB Browser for SQLite · Google: BigQuery sandbox · DataCamp pricing

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About the author

Ivan Ivanov

Founder ofHawkValue

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