How Did I Become An Advanced Excel User?
I started at the bottom. I grew up with a computer in the home, took a computer course in high school and college, and had several jobs that used excel in some way. I thought I knew what I needed to know. That is until I went to work in an office where everything was done in excel.
The Interview
Yep, there was an excel test that all applicants had to pass. No big deal, I thought, I could just find a similar test online and practice using that. There a lot of websites that will offer a free trial to try out excel interview tests. So I did just that. And you know what? I passed with flying colors. I thought I was set but the problem was that all of the test prep good for passing the test but hardly helpful for using excel expertly. I had a long way to go.
Day 1
We all know its frustrating to watch over someone’s shoulder and direct them to navigate through any program on a computer. “Click Tools… You just passed it… Near the center. Left like two inches. There you go” Yeah its not fun. Its not fun to be either person actually. But that was me on my first day of work. Employers shouldn’t have to worry about that with major programs, like Excel, Word, and Windows in general. Its not a good look for a new employee. I was doing everything the hard way: relying on my mouse to navigate in excel, using Find and Replace to search every item in a table,
counting cells with my eyes, and using a calculator to manually sum data. Bad Excel work! I was so slow. The work quickly piled on. I started to look for answers on the web to see what I was missing and began teaching myself how to do thinks quicker, better, and correctly.
3 Months Later
Fortunately, I was still at the same job. I continued to teach myself new things in excel. I spent 80% of my working time in excel. I quickly realized, while I was drowning in data entry and spreadsheet tasks, that one hour spent learning could quickly result in dozens of hours saved. I moved on from the basic formulas to nesting formulas inside of other formulas (get used to parentheses), conditional formatting, and proper spreadsheet creation. I was helping other people with their Excel issues and collaborating
with other excel savvy coworkers. The workload became more manageable and my stress decreased. I had surpassed some coworkers who also used excel every day. Sometimes a classroom isn’t the best way to learn. That’s why we at Index Matched decided to help users learn in whatever way is going to help them. We want you to benefit the same way I did from learning Excel.