Obviously, everywhere you look this week, you find advice on how to do better this year.
Well, you don’t have to wait for a new year to become awesome at your work, any day is new year for the rest of your life.
So, today I want to share 12 steps to learn Excel and becoming awesome. But first I have a secret to confess…,
I think becoming awesome in Excel useless.
What we really want is, to become awesome in our work. Since we spend a lot of time using Excel (and other office software), knowing how to use these better can have a huge impact on how we do our work.
In that spirit, lets look at 12 steps to learn Excel so you become awesome in your work.
1. Learn everyday
Curiosity, humbleness & open mind can go a long way in making you awesome. So in order to become awesome in our work, we need to learn everyday. There is a wealth of free, useful & well designed information on net on almost any topic. For Excel, I suggest going thru our archives, category pages on Excel, Charting, Quick Tips, or the Learn any area of Excel page.
For more specific focus, check out Excel Beginner or Advanced Excel pages too.
2. Volunteer & Improve something at your work
No matter how good something is, there is always scope for improvement. I am sure you have similar situation at your work. So pick up any single process, report, model or procedure & improve it using readily available tools like Excel. It is one of the easiest ways to learn Excel. For example, you could improve the financial dashboard that gets emailed every month or track your training (L&D) better.
3. Help a colleague
The funny thing with knowledge is that, the more you share it, the more you gain. No wonder, when we think of very knowledgeable persons, we imagine teachers & authors. And in any workplace, your knowledge determines how awesome you can be.
So go ahead and help a colleague in need. Share what you know and see the magic.
4. Join a forum & solve a problem
Forums are a great place to find new problems & challenge yourself. Go ahead and contribute in a forum that focuses on your area of work. For Excel, I suggest checking out our Forums.
You will learn new things & the best part is, you are going to help a total stranger. The sense of satisfaction you get is unmatched.
5. Get a book
Despite the amount of information & variety available online, books continue to have a sense of magic. The moment you open a book, your mind opens a new world. So go ahead and indulge in a book or two this year. Learn something & then apply it to your work. See how far you can go.
For Excel & related books, check out my recommendations.
6. Participate in a Contest
Contests are a great way to learn new things, experiment & win something cool. While finding a contest for your exact work area might be difficult, you can find several contests on Excel & other common office software. I am planning to run a few contests this year and I encourage you to participate in at least one of them.
Check out past contests & Excel challenges.
7. Play with an unknown feature
Many of us continue to use software, tools without questioning our practices. For example, despite using Excel quite a bit, I rarely use Review Ribbon. I don’t know many of the things in there. I am sure you too have such gaps. This year, pick one such thing and play with it. Learn what you can do with that feature, do a bit of research, and if possible share your knowledge with people in your work life. If you are not sure what to pick, may I suggest Power Query? It is an incredible tool packed right inside Excel. Check out this intro and get started.
8. Replicate an idea from other industry to your work
Despite all the negativity in the world, we continue to see shining examples of innovation, hope & prosperity. Often, these are simple ideas implemented with finesse. You too can watch elsewhere for inspiration & copy the ideas to your work. For example, you can watch New York Times for interesting visualizations and copy the ideas for your weekly report. Or you can subscribe to blogs in a different industry so that you can get fresh ideas.
Related: Visualization projects.
9. Join a Newsletter or Subscribe to a Blog
While learning from other industries can give you new ideas, learning about your own industry increases your knowledge. So go ahead and join a newsletter or subscribe to a blog. Consume their content regularly and apply these ideas to your work.
For Excel users, I recommend joining our newsletter, Debra’s blog, Excel Jet or any site featured in our Excel links.
10. Jump to YouTube
YouTube continues to be a great way to learn new things. You can find instructional videos on any topic & learn from bite-sized clips.
For Excel users, check out our YouTube channel, ExcelisFun, MrExcel Podcast, Debra’s channel
11. Join a Training Program
One of the best ways to learn & become awesome is to join a class. So this year, invest in a training program that helps you in your work.
To learn Excel & how to use it for your work, I recommend our Excel School, VBA Class programs.
12. Believe that you are Awesome
One of my favorite quotes is,
Whatever human mind can conceive, it can achieve.
Napoleon Hill (in his book Think & Grow Rich)
So the most important aspect of becoming awesome is to believe you are awesome. No books, videos, blogs or contests can make you awesome if you don’t believe that you can be awesome.
Those are my 12 steps to learn Excel & become awesome, what about yours?
So those are my 12 ways to become awesome. What about yours? How are you planning to be awesome this year? Please share using comments.
More Resources to learn
If you want to learn Excel, Dashboards etc., check out these articles too.
49 Responses to “Project Management Dashboard / Project Status Report using Excel [Part 6 of 6]”
[...] display milestones Part 4: Time sheets and Resource management Issue Trackers & Risk Management Project Status Reporting – Dashboard Bonus Post: Using Burn Down Charts to Understand Project [...]
Excellent!
I was looking forward to this and you've done it again...Shame I can't claim it was all my own work 😉
ps hope you're getting enough sleep
Excelent !!! Tks to share your knowledge with us.
Izabel
Sao Paulo - Brazil
Nice job!.
I'm also keen on PM Excel Dashboards. Please, take a look at
http://screencast.com/t/TyaxH5r4mDf
That's one example of my Project control Spreadsheets.
Cheers
Hi Miguel,
Do you share your PM Excel Dashboards? It looks awesome.
Regards,
Germán
Hi M. Miguel,
Can you share your Excel Dashboards? Awesome work BTW.
Regards,
Michel Levesque
Can you share the PM excel template?
[...] haired Dilbert hat zum Abschluss einer Artikeserie zum Thema Projektmanagement mit Excel eine Anleitung zum Bau eines Projekt-Dashboards veröffentlicht. Ein Dashboard ist eine Visualisierungsform für große Mengen von meist [...]
Quite a nice and helpful article. I am sure excel is one of the most used application across many many big companies. And your info on project status update using excel would surely be usefull. Keep up the good work on this blog site. Also to share there are some open source flash-based graphing and charting solution which caould also be used on any project..
http://askwiki.blogspot.com/2009/07/how-to-create-quality-charts-using.html
@Alex, Izabel .. thank you 🙂
@Miguel: Thank you. Your dashboard looks very good. It is inclined towards the budget and finances of the project. I have kept those aspects out of this series. May be I will revisit the financial aspect of projects at a later point.
@Rishil: Thank you. Yes, you can create flash based charts (or even simple image based charts) and embed them in a project dashboard that can be published to the team using intranet (like sharepoint). This is how large companies usually do it. Thanks for sharing the Askwiki article.
Great looking dashboard!! Do you have a version for the Mac versions of Office available?
Thanks
Chandoo,
this is great piece of collating info.I liked it and shall try using it in office.
Thanks for the all hard work behind this.
Chandoo,
Kudos. This is really as simple as it gets for laymen. We did this sort of stuff in Consulting - but this can now become really simple for people. Will have my team look at this! Great work.
thanks,
Mrigank
[...] I suggest reading my 7 part series on project management using excel. Starting with Excel Gantt Charts to Project Dashboards. [...]
Just downloaded the project management template bundle...great!
Have you done anywork on a Project Portfolio Dashboard template?
@Bw... Thanks for getting a copy of the templates. 🙂 I have worked on few assignments where we built such templates. But these are similar to other regular dashboard templates. I will share some of these ideas in a later post someday. Meanwhile if you have any ideas on how to structure project portfolio dashboard, let me know using comments or email.
[...] to display milestones Time sheets and Resource management Issue Trackers & Risk Management Project Status Reporting – Dashboard Bonus Post: Using Burn Down Charts to Understand Project [...]
[...] display milestones Time sheets and Resource management Part 5: Issue Trackers & Risk Management Project Status Reporting – Dashboard Bonus Post: Using Burn Down Charts to Understand Project [...]
[...] to display milestones Time sheets and Resource management Issue Trackers & Risk Management Project Status Reporting – Dashboard Bonus Post: Using Burn Down Charts to Understand Project [...]
Thanks fro the great ideas! To get a sense of the layout and design of a Dashboard more geared toward Cost and Schedule anaysis, check out the example Dashboard at http://www.ProjectDashboards.com which was built entirely in excel.
hey,
i just need a simple Chart where by i can show some of the projects by % wise. no dates required.
1st column Project name and 2nd column will be status (filled with %). can you pls help me out.
Thanks.
@DS... if you have excel 2007, you can use data bars in conditional formatting for this purpose.
Hi Chandoo - this series is an excellent resource and tutorial, thank you for sharing.
When I sat down to consider what my dashboard should look like, one of the most important features for me is to be able to maintain version control and to show simply on what version is on display.
Apart from the naming convention of the file name, is there a good way to do this within a dashboard? I'd be interested to hear your thoughts!
@Larph: Welcome 🙂
> You can do version control thru Macros (but always remember that your audience can disable macros)
> Another option is to use a static time stamp / version number in the title page of dashboard that you update manually whenever you make changes to the file
> In excel 2010, you can keep track of file versions from File menu. This can be used to select a previous version of dashboard.
> Best option is to use a version control system like SVN or upload files to Sharepoint or something like that. This will take care of versioning for you (although it is a bit technical and dashboard audience may have difficulty figuring the versions out).
> The easiest option is to use filenames and the CELL() formula to get the version number (or date) from the filename so you can show it on the dashboard.
Hi Chandoo... I'm following you from Brazil...
I would like to thank you for the tips about excel, mainly with dashboards ... It helped me a lot …
Take care...
Di
On the dashboard when I print, the text is blanked out in the middle of the Issues list - suggestions on how to fix?
[...] Project Management Dashboard in Excel [...]
Hi Chandoo, do you have an equivalent Project Management Dashboard / Project Status Report for MS Office 2010?
As a Microsoft trainer I'm interested in your choice of Excel for project management. I'm assuming that you've tried Microsoft Project and have decided not to use it? We get folks on our MS Project courses who've tried to use Excel for PM purposes and none of them have made such an impressive project plan, but I wonder is it worth all the effort?
This looks very interesting. How may I be a part of this
Does this template work in Google Spreadsheets?
Many thanks for sharing your expertise with us. Keep up the good work 🙂
Heya i'm for the first time here. I came across this board and I to find It really helpful & it helped me out a lot. I am hoping to offer one thing again and aid others like you helped me.
Hi Chandoo,
Your PM dashboards impressed me so much that I've downloaded the Portfolio and Project Management package. All of the documents look very professional.
I was going through the Portfolio dashboard and I had a question.
When I enter in additional holidays they are highlighted in the gantt chart. Is it possible so that the name of the holiday shows up in the highlighted area of the gantt chart.
Thanks
Adam
[...] Project Status Dashboard [...]
[...] Project Status Dashboard in Excel [...]
[...] Project Management Dashboard in Excel [...]
can you confirm that the downloads will work on a mac - excel for mac v14.3.6
thanks
Made a slight variation on the schedule sheet,
1. Add a date column for start
2. In week column cell use =weeknum() and link to date cell
3. Hide week column
When you enter in a date for each task the week number is populated accordingly
simple but more effective, you can also dynamically link the date cell to your MSP project file for even more automation!!
I purchased a copy of the project management dashboard excel file. I misplaced the password to unlock the file and make modification. Can you please resend the password.
Thank much in advance...
Hi there! I just would like to give you a big thumbs up for your great info
you've got right here on this post. I'll be returning to your website
for more soon.
I bought ur project management template just want to know how to hide the budget section from portfolio?
Hi, Thanks - very good job you've prepared!
You've inspired me as well 🙂
Best regards
Hello!
I am using a gantt chart template which i got from your website. All is good just when I add all my acitivities in data spreadsheet and then go back to gantt chart to view them, I only see first 9 and then I need to keep scrolling for the next ones. is it possible to see most of the activities if not all in the single frame.
thanks for answering!
This is my first time pay a visit at here and i am actually happy to read all at alone place.
I am interested in your dashboard; downloaded the locked version, unable to use it...do you have a user guide that is available that I can see and use on the locked version?
Please send me daily newsletter
Hi,
I downloaded the PM dashboard and the gantt chart only has dates till the year 2016. How do I change this to include 2017 FY as well.
When I enter a activity for this year , it fails to show up on the chart.
Hi
Would.like to purchase the project management .kits
Pls share the payment link in INR
Also share your contact number to speak with you
Regards
Hari
9384825926