Learning Excel

[Frenchy180]

Alright everyone... I'm in a position at work where there is a ton of room to move up, but a common theme with all the job listings seems to be the fact that Excel knowledge is necessary... I love where I'm at, but would like to eventually move up, so I have time to better myself as a potential candidate for any future jobs I might want in the company... I plan on learning Excel in the next two or so months in my free time... I'm curious if any of you have taught yourselves, and what resources did you use along the way?

Another thing I want to do to improve myself is take as many customer service classes at work as possible... Being a heavy machinery dealership, it's extremely important that anyone dealing with customers has awesome customer service skills... Anyway, looking forward to your advice on learning excel!

[theMileHighGuy]

No joke, Youtube is your best friend. People post some amazing tutorial related things on there. I've taught myself excel, java, photoshop, dreamweaver, and maybe one or two other things just from youtube tuts,

check out this series by Guru Ji

[Frenchy180]

No joke, Youtube is your best friend. People post some amazing tutorial related things on there. I've taught myself excel, java, photoshop, dreamweaver, and maybe one or two other things just from youtube tuts,

check out this series by Guru Ji

thanks bud, I appreciate the help! I'll be checking that out later for sure.

[darth-hideous]

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-US/

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/re...Tutorials&ex=2

EXCEl Made Easy is a Facebook page he has quite a few tutorial available

Workforce Colrado (Unemeployment Office) has free training for all Office products, among other clerical type training that may come in handy.

[PowderAddict]

Get an Excel book as well, they can be a great resource. Try to make your spreadsheets not just functional, but easy to look at. Use of color, bolding fields, etc. A wall of numbers is as painful to look at as a wall of text on the forums.

I used to use Excel a lot, but it's been about a year. I've already forgotten a ton

[SBboundBRONCOS]

also, look into a class at a local college maybe. Esp if your employer will help pay for it because its job related training. I found that having to do the work made it easier to learn.

i use excel everyday and know i havent even scratched the surface of what it can do, it is a very powerful tool if you know how to use it

[DenverBlood]

also, look into a class at a local college maybe. Esp if your employer will help pay for it because its job related training. I found that having to do the work made it easier to learn.

i use excel everyday and know i havent even scratched the surface of what it can do, it is a very powerful tool if you know how to use it

This is why I find it a little humurous that the others are referring to it as learning Excel. There is no learning Excel. There is learning to be sufficient enough at Excel to benefit yourself in your career. But it's virtually impossible to learn all of Excel.

People would be shocked to see some of the capabilities of Excel that most of us didn't even know you could do. Not to mention I had a college course that ran Monte Carlo simulations for finance. The teacher said it cost the school like $50,000 to have the software installed on each individual computer in the computer lab. And they only did it in 1 of the labs. So teachers had to reserve that lab when they needed that software for classes.

But to the OP yes if you want to further your career, especially if it's in business, you should at least learn to become proficient at the basics of Excel. There simply is no surviving without it. You can get tons of tutorials online, buy a how to Excel book or take a college course. I learned a lot through college but also a lot more from colleagues at work. You'd be surprised what knowledge your coworkers have sometimes.

[PowderAddict]

This is why I find it a little humurous that the others are referring to it as learning Excel. There is no learning Excel. There is learning to be sufficient enough at Excel to benefit yourself in your career. But it's virtually impossible to learn all of Excel.

People would be shocked to see some of the capabilities of Excel that most of us didn't even know you could do. Not to mention I had a college course that ran Monte Carlo simulations for finance. The teacher said it cost the school like $50,000 to have the software installed on each individual computer in the computer lab. And they only did it in 1 of the labs. So teachers had to reserve that lab when they needed that software for classes.

But to the OP yes if you want to further your career, especially if it's in business, you should at least learn to become proficient at the basics of Excel. There simply is no surviving without it. You can get tons of tutorials online, buy a how to Excel book or take a college course. I learned a lot through college but also a lot more from colleagues at work. You'd be surprised what knowledge your coworkers have sometimes.

Good advice, especially since every work group uses Excel differently.

[DenverBlood]

Good advice, especially since every work group uses Excel differently.

No kidding man. I'm in finance at Boeing. It's divided into a few seperate fields on the program and each group uses excel for many different kinds of reports.

But I didn't even mention how many other tools Excel can talk to very well. We do data dumps and exports from our system tools to excel all the time. Excel can also talk to Microsoft Project. Like I said the list of things you can do in Excel is endless.

[Joshua2585]

Honestly dude, Excel is a dinosaur. If you want to be a true hero in the office, here are a couple solutions that are massive improvements:

www.trackvia.com is a Denver based customizable online DB platform. It is a cloud-based solution and can have a lot of users utilizing it at once. It is a business-user tool, so it is pretty easy to learn and is a big improvement over Excel.

www.quickbase.com is another. This is a Intuits attempt at a database solution. They are well known for their accounting software, quickbooks. It is a bit more complicated and tends to not be as customizable as the previous suggestion, but is a decent option.

www.caspio.com is an older solution that has a lot of pre-built templates. They have a really ugly interface, but have been around a long time.

In the end... learning Excel is almost a waste of time nowadays (unless you are using at home for simple accounting or asset mgt and don't need a collaborative aspect). The age of cloud-based systems is upon us. If your company isn't going to spend the time and money putting together an in-house system, then they will most likely migrate to the cloud in the near future. You literally cannot run a business effectively on Microsoft Excel anymore.

[DenverBlood]

Honestly dude, Excel is a dinosaur. If you want to be a true hero in the office, here are a couple solutions that are massive improvements:

www.trackvia.com is a Denver based customizable online DB platform. It is a cloud-based solution and can have a lot of users utilizing it at once. It is a business-user tool, so it is pretty easy to learn and is a big improvement over Excel.

www.quickbase.com is another. This is a Intuits attempt at a database solution. They are well known for their accounting software, quickbooks. It is a bit more complicated and tends to not be as customizable as the previous suggestion, but is a decent option.

www.caspio.com is an older solution that has a lot of pre-built templates. They have a really ugly interface, but have been around a long time.

In the end... learning Excel is almost a waste of time nowadays (unless you are using at home for simple accounting or asset mgt and don't need a collaborative aspect). The age of cloud-based systems is upon us. If your company isn't going to spend the time and money putting together an in-house system, then they will most likely migrate to the cloud in the near future. You literally cannot run a business effectively on Microsoft Excel anymore.

This is a completely hilarious post. While yes the main money making tools of a company are not Excel it is still an extremely used product by the employees. Boeing has probably 30+ different web based tools used across programs and job fields. However every single employee still utilizes Excel in some form or another. If you don't realize this you are extremely misinformed on the uses of Excel.

Even most of the web based tools are formed based off the Excel concept. Excel is not a dinasour and is not going anywhere. Especially when it's cost effective to have it included in Microsoft suites on all computers.



Being knowledgable in Excel is a requirement to even be interviewed in the business industry today. Go ahead and choose to think its a dinosaur and don't become proficient at it. You'll have a hard time progressing your career.

[Frenchy180]

I want to take a moment to thank you all for your advice and help in the matter... However, please do not turn this into a "these products are better..." "no they're not" war... Thanks guys!

[xX-Bronco-Xx]

http://www.amazon.com/Learn-Excel-Es...keywords=excel

Might be worth the money.

[sbxxxiichamps]

my advanced excel course in college was the hardest class id ever taken. I took away so little from it, the professor was a genius but not necessarily the best teacher.

I mean the basics should come simple enough to pick up. But there are some fairly advanced formulas that Id recommend getting a book in order to learn. Not sure how knowledgeable your looking to become but if you want to learn how to write macros and what not then the best of luck to you lol!

And with it anything, if you don't use it repeatedly you'll forget it.

[Frenchy180]

also, look into a class at a local college maybe. Esp if your employer will help pay for it because its job related training. I found that having to do the work made it easier to learn.

i use excel everyday and know i havent even scratched the surface of what it can do, it is a very powerful tool if you know how to use it

When I was talking to my boss today, I told him that I wanted to learn more about excel, and he told me he'd get me into some classes for it through the company... I imagine that would be a good way of going about things, since they'll have a better idea of what exactly the company uses it for.