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.
2 Responses to “Top 10 Power BI Interview Questions & Answers”
Hello...
In Power BI I have data that includes months by name only (e.g. May, April, December...)
I need to build charts etc. but i need the months to go chronologically... not alphabetically... I cannot seem to find the fix to this.... once again, my data does NOT have an actual date attached to it (like 02/01/2023)....only month names... can i use a helper table wher i id the month names as numbers 1 thru 12? and if so, how do i manage this to work for me ?
Thank you.
~Keith
You need to setup an extra table to map each month name to a running number. A simple 12 row table like
Jan 1
Feb 2
Mar 3
..
Dec 12
Then create a relationship between this month table and your month column
Now, go to "table view" in Power BI and set the sort by column to month number for the month name column on this new table.
Finally, use the new table's month name whenever you need to refer to the month name in the visuals.
They will be chronologically arranged.