Many of us want to learn advanced Excel and make progress in our career. But how to do it?
In this post, I show 3+1 ways in which you can learn advanced excel.
Last week I did an interview with Robert Mundigl of clearlyandsimply.com. Robert is an Excel wizard. You may know him thru the KPI Dashboard articles he has written on chandoo.org a while ago.
We spent about 90 minutes discussing some really cool & advanced Excel stuff. The interview will be available shortly on Excel School for our Dashboard students. But here is a snapshot of the dashboard we discussed in the interview. Robert taught me how to make such a dashboard using Excel.
Anyhow, I digress, so lets comeback. The topic of this post is 3+1 ways to excel in Excel.
1. Join Excel School:
Of course, the best possible way to learn Excel is to go thru a class. This is a proven approach and the 900 students of Excel School are a glowing testimony that it works. I believe that, by investing as little as 2-3 hours every week, anyone can become really awesome in tools like Excel. Sometimes, the benefits of training program are far-reaching, like the case of Ceri Williams, Excel School student in batch 1, 2 and 4:
I want to share some good news with you ! In recognition for my outputs & assistance to others, BT and recently made me an Excel SME (subject matter expert) … there’s only 9 of us in BT (100k+ employees in BT, and I’m the only one in BT Retail ~25k employees). Whilst I always considered myself as having strong excel skills I can honestly say your blog & tuition has taken me to a different level. So a massive thank you for sharing your knowledge & experience !!!
Key areas I think I have developed the most are :
– Integration of advanced functions to meet the needs of everyday problems (and even using simple ones to better effect) !
– Simplifying my style for visualizing data … I confess I use to add a few bells & whistles for my own guilty pleasures to old charts as opposed to delivering what they were designed for .. deliver simple, clear messages.— Ceri Williams
You too can become like Ceri or countless other students who become awesome at their work just by learning the ropes of Excel.
2. Learn Financial Modeling & Project Finance
Excel is used very much in financial industry because of the powerful analysis, modeling and calculation features it has. That is why, learning Financial Modeling or Project Finance modeling using Excel can be great career move.
We have concluded our first batch of financial modeling school recently and re-opened the program for students this week. So far, we already have 31 students in the program and many more are joining each day.
You too can join the program and become a financial modeling ninja.
For details & sign-up instructions, visit Financial Modeling School page.
3. Learn Excel Dashboards
Excel dashboards & Excel based Business Intelligence is another emerging area. Due to its ease of use and ability to integrate with database systems, Excel is a favorite among people building dashboards.
But making a dashboard is an arduous, complex process. And this is where, you could use step-by-step instruction and example material.
If you wish to learn Excel Dashboards, I recommend joining Excel School with Dashboards Option. It is an excellent program that teaches all things in Excel School + video instruction on making 4 different type of dashboards – KPI Dashboards, Business Dashboards, Sales Dashboards and Website Dashboards. There is a wealth of bonus material, dashboard tips & interviews with more than 10 hours of video content.
Click here to learn more about the program and Join.
+1. Read something new & Play with examples
Even if you are not ready for a paid program to learn excel, you can still excel in Excel by just reading 1-2 articles on Chandoo.org or any other Excel blog once a week. For starters, I recommend reading any article on these pages,
- http://chandoo.org/wp/category/best-of-phd/
- http://excelhero.com/blog/
- http://contextures.com/tiptech.html
- http://peltiertech.com/Excel/Charts/ChartIndex.html
- Or get any book featured here.
That is all for now. Go on and become awesome in Excel.
24 Responses to “10 Supercool UI Improvements in Excel 2010”
The best improvement by far is the Collapse Ribbon ^ button !
Kind of a shame that some of the best improvements are actually returns to old functionality. One thing I don't like is that to get to recent files I need to do an extra click after File - apart from Save As, that's why I'm usually in the File menu. I like the sparkline options, though they are still as not fully featured as some of the free and pay options out there.
The collapse button for the ribbon menu is good news. Can you make the ribbon menus stick too?
Nine improvements, not ten. You can also select multiple objects in 2007. Click on the Find & Select item at the far right of the Home tab, and the dropdown looks remarkably like your 2010 screenshot.
@Jon.. Thank you. Dumb me, I somehow thought we couldnt select objects in Excel 2007. Just saw the "select menu" and it is there. I have corrected the post and removed the point. I have added the "you can make your own ribbons" instead. Thanks once again.
@Arti: what do you mean by make ribbons stick?
@Alex: May be it is my installation, but when I go to "File menu" I see "recent files" by default.
For example, if I am working with one of the contextual ribbon menus (Pivot tables, Drawing/Chart etc), as soon as I click away from the selected object, the menu tabs vanish. If I click on the object again immediately, then Excel will remember what I was looking at, but if I wander away and click on a Pivot, then back again on the Chart, the menus will 'appear' but not get activated, thereby causing much annoyance and additional clicking.
I want to "pin" the whole menu (not invididual commands) somehow, so that I can have the menu there for the length of the time I am working with graphics. Excel 2003 used to have the Drawing toolbar you could detach and hover while you were working, but this functionality disappeared in Excel 2007.
My thought was Excel should just allow a 'pin', similar to the Recently Opened files menu, for the Ribbon Menus as well. If I have not selected any Drawing object, the commands can be greyed out, but I want the menu as a whole to 'stick'.
@Arti... I think MS solved this problem differently. When I select a pivot and go to "design" tab Excel 2010 remembers this and automatically takes me to "design" tab when I reselect the pivot.
Apart from this you can also define your own ribbon with all the things you normally do. See the above article (I have added this after Jon's comments)
Nice feature. About time for a upgrade for MS Office
Oh... okay. That might be a start. I'd probably just copy-paste the Drawing tab haha. Thanks. I'll definitely give Excel 2010 a try.
Btw - have you considered getting into / gotten into the world of Excel as it meets SharePoint?
Actually, the replacement new thing is probably better than all the rest. One thing that the designers of the Office 2007 ignored was allowing regular users to customize their own interface. Office 2010's interface was expanded in this way to address the huge uproar.
Is there still a limit on how many things you can add to the QAT bar? (I'm too lazy to look myself.)
@Jeff.. it seems to take quite a few, but only shows one line and gives a little arrow button at the end. (summary: shucks!)
The best thing is you can edit the ribbon directly from excel, so now i can create my own bar with just the things I use regularly!
One of the annoying things in 07 for me is the Add-Ins menu bar - in 03 I could keystroke directly to menu add ins.. In 07 I needed an extra keystroke just to activate the add-in menu, then the keystrokes as normal.. Hope this marek sense..
John -
If you remember the old Excel 2003 Alt-key shortcuts, you can still use them in 2007. To get to the Add-In dialog:
Alt-T-I
Dear Arti & Chandoo
Seen your comments over some issues. Hope you are form India, gone through your comment expecting a pin to command it as a whole, great, hope if someone out of MS have read it, it may be kept in mind while the next R & D of Office Ver. 16
Just incase someone forgot CTRL+F1 will collapse the ribbon.
[...] was pleasantly surprised when I ran Microsoft Excel 2010 for first time. It felt smooth, fast, responsive and looked great on my [...]
I like the sparklines, and the ability to modify the charts
How do you get rid of the advertisment on the right hand side? If you upgrade then will it take off the ads?
Once again Microsoft has re-decorated the Office and we are NOT pleased!
The graphics object selector can be found in the Home ribbon under Find & Select, Select Objects near the bottom of the drop down. You can make it part of the Quick Access toolbar by right click over it and selecting Add to Quick Access toolbar.
The graphics "cursor" will now appear on the mini-toolbar at the top left of the window.
How to get rid of "Add-Ins" button in Backstage (File)" menu by means of XML code, i.e. to hide, to delete or to disable this button?
This button is usually situated in the Backstage menu between "Help" and "Options" buttons.
Vladimir, did you ever get an answer to your question?
I am tying to customize the ribbon UI for a file using XML, and this is precisely the piece I can't figure out. I can hide other tabs, remove items from QAT and backstage - all except the options that are showing up under add-ins in backstage. If there is an XML syntax for referencing this thing and making it invisible, I cannot find it.
Hey, nice tutorial. Please check my video tutorial on similar topic at the below link and provide your comments:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TeIFc0jYjpA