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.
25 Responses to “Shift Calendar Template – FREE Download”
Hi Chandoo,
your recent postings include only Excel 2007 templates. Unfortunately the company I work at still runs Excel 2003. Is it possible to get your awesome files in other excel version as well?
Thanks so much for your great excel stuff!
Is it possible to do this for shifts with hours instead of days? To organise a three shift day?
Thanks in advance,
Stelios
In my organization there are 45 employees i need split then into three shifts ex:A shift:14,B shift:14,C shift:14 and week off:3 kindly help me on this.
@Masthan
You need to understand what rules your company has for the various shifts / roster combinations
Chandoo, I once did a shift control spreadsheet for my team. I put one person in each line, the columns were the days. I put a shift code in each cell indicating in which shift that person should work, or if the person were out that day. I have two codes for being out. One is for vacations and one is to compensate days worked in weekends. This way I was able to count how many persons I have in each shift, how many were on vacations and how many were out compensating (that's the term we use here) weekend worked hours.
Later I included the possibility of a person be in two lines one for normal hours other for overtime. This is mainly used for planning purposes. If you would like I can send you an example. The only problem of this spreadsheet is that we don't have a person view, only this consolidated view.
Hi George, I would like to have a copy of your spreadsheet if you can share it.
Thanks in advance, Chuck
Hi Chandoo,
Where is the code located ? is it VBA ? If so , how do you hide it ? Or it is .NET ?
Thx
@Idan
.
No VBA or code, it is all done with Mirrors.
Only Joking,
.
But there is no VBA or code,
It is all done with Named Formulas and Lookups.
Have alook at the cells in the calander area and Named Formulas in the Formulas, Name Manager Tab.
How can i calculate between two or more different workbooks? Please, reply me as early as possible.
@Anand
Open the workbooks you want to link to
Start a formula = and click and change between workbooks as required.
You can use the View, Switch window menu to change workbooks mid formula
The format for using workbooks is
=[Workbook.xlsm]Sheet1!$A$1
or
=SUM('[Book2.xls]Sheet1'!$A$1:$D$10)
etc
Hi Chandoo,
I am working with a call centre wherein i ned to update at the month end 20 to 30 employees login hours which are defict to track it at the month end is very difficult is there any template which can be made to track that why on a particular day a guy who needs to be on calls was why not on calls.
Thank you so much Chandoo. This is really helping me. As usual, you rock.
What's FortyTwoDays and Calendar in Name manager?
Both are unused and FortyTwoDays doesn't make any sense.
I have a SQL db that contains records of events scheduled/completed on a particular date. Can this method ous building a calendar be used to display those events on the respective day?
Positively awesome!
I'm attempting to help a friend create a schedule for adult classes - and of course its not"paid help". Here is the scenario:
20 classes, instructor, room#, student class size, start date, number of class days (need to subtract weekends)
class
instructor
room
students
start
#days
PATH
karen
201
21
01/01/13
11
BILLING
jane
401
15
01/12/13
13
MEDISOFT
mike
301
11
01/25/13
9
he'd like to see these classes show up in different colors within the same month's calendar chart. He can draw it, but I'd like to see it done automatically through data, and I just can't visualize it, but I KNOW this will work - can you help?
Jan 🙂
Dear chandoo,
Try many way to download still can't access. Any way we want to try out 3 shifts with 3 guys in a group .eg Group A Morn, Group B Night and Group C Rest. And every each group must work on sunday to take turns. In fact we are security teams so that's why sunday is required to work. Pls guide and show how to put in the working calendar. Thank you in advance.
I've been trying to copy and/or recreate this to use in a workbook I'm doing for the transportation department I'm working for. I need to have the calendar on the first sheet in my document (it has graph's from data on another sheet). I'm trying to use it to track (with the conditional formatting) accidents and injuries. I've redone the conditional formatting to do 4 different accident types (no injury, near miss, OSHA recordable injury and work loss injury), but when I enter the formula's you have in the calendar portion where it says "DateOfFirst-FirstWeekDay" I can't figure out how you did that. Are you able to help?
I would like to use Excel to solve the following problem for a community work. I want to create a Driver schedule for a given month from a pool of volunteers for a community service. Each of these volunteers can drive only on specific days in a week. I would like to populate the driving schedule for each weekday with primary, secondary and tertiary drivers in a random fashion so that I do not overburden one person. I would greatly any help you can provide.
Hi chandoo,
Thanks for your valuable effort for create this template and let me know how to add multiple employees in the the Roaster.
Hi Chandoo,
This article on shift roaster is very helpful. Could you please let me know how i can use the same for n number of resources who work 24/7, considering their leaves and holidays?
Thanks,
Savitha
Hi Chandoo,
This article on shift roaster is very helpful to all. Could you please let me know how i can use the same if I want to add for some more shifts, since the color is not getting change if I add more shifts like 4,5 etc.,
Thanks,
Murali
nice post
How can I change the date to 2017 under Shift Data worksheet.
solution 1:
mydata=B2:C16
stoplist=E2:E8
=LET(RNG,A2:A16,SMR,C2:C16, F,(RNG=E2)+(RNG=E3)+(RNG=E4)+(RNG=E5)+(RNG=E6)+(RNG=E7)+(RNG=E8),SUM(SMR)-SUM(SMR*F))
=LET(RNG,A2:A16,SMR,C2:C16,RH,N(B2:B16=B2), F,(RNG=E2)+(RNG=E3)+(RNG=E4)+(RNG=E5)+(RNG=E6)+(RNG=E7)+(RNG=E8),TOT,SUM(SMR)-SUM(SMR*RH*F),SUM(SMR*RH)-SUM(SMR* RH*F))
ALTERNATE SOLUTION
=SUM(C2:C16)-SUM(FILTER(C2:C16,ISNUMBER(BYROW(A2:A16,LAMBDA(a,TOROW(SEARCH(a,E2:E8),2))))))
=SUM((B2:B16=B2)*(C2:C16))-SUM((ISNUMBER(BYROW(A2:A16,LAMBDA(a,TOROW(SEARCH(a,E2:E8),2))))*(B2:B16=B2)*(C2:C16)))
let
Source = Excel.CurrentWorkbook(){[Name="Table1"]}[Content],
#"Replaced Value" = Table.ReplaceValue(Source,null,";",Replacer.ReplaceValue,{"Column1"}),
#"Transposed Table" = Table.Transpose(#"Replaced Value"),
#"Removed Other Columns" = Table.SelectColumns(#"Transposed Table",{"Column1", "Column2", "Column3", "Column4", "Column5", "Column6", "Column7", "Column8", "Column9", "Column10", "Column11", "Column12", "Column13", "Column14", "Column15", "Column16", "Column17", "Column18", "Column19", "Column20", "Column21", "Column22", "Column23", "Column24", "Column25", "Column26", "Column27", "Column28", "Column29", "Column30", "Column31", "Column32", "Column33", "Column34", "Column35", "Column36", "Column37", "Column38", "Column39", "Column40", "Column41", "Column42", "Column43", "Column44", "Column45", "Column46", "Column47", "Column48", "Column49", "Column50", "Column51", "Column52", "Column53", "Column54", "Column55", "Column56", "Column57", "Column58", "Column59", "Column60", "Column61", "Column62", "Column63", "Column64", "Column65", "Column66", "Column67", "Column68", "Column69", "Column70", "Column71", "Column72", "Column73", "Column74", "Column75", "Column76", "Column77", "Column78", "Column79", "Column80", "Column81", "Column82", "Column83", "Column84", "Column85", "Column86", "Column87"}),
#"Merged Columns" = Table.CombineColumns(#"Removed Other Columns",{"Column1", "Column2", "Column3", "Column4", "Column5", "Column6", "Column7", "Column8", "Column9", "Column10", "Column11", "Column12", "Column13", "Column14", "Column15", "Column16", "Column17", "Column18", "Column19", "Column20", "Column21", "Column22", "Column23", "Column24", "Column25", "Column26", "Column27", "Column28", "Column29", "Column30", "Column31", "Column32", "Column33", "Column34", "Column35", "Column36", "Column37", "Column38", "Column39", "Column40", "Column41", "Column42", "Column43", "Column44", "Column45", "Column46", "Column47", "Column48", "Column49", "Column50", "Column51", "Column52", "Column53", "Column54", "Column55", "Column56", "Column57", "Column58", "Column59", "Column60", "Column61", "Column62", "Column63", "Column64", "Column65", "Column66", "Column67", "Column68", "Column69", "Column70", "Column71", "Column72", "Column73", "Column74", "Column75", "Column76", "Column77", "Column78", "Column79", "Column80", "Column81", "Column82", "Column83", "Column84", "Column85", "Column86", "Column87"},Combiner.CombineTextByDelimiter("|", QuoteStyle.None),"Merged"),
#"Split Column by Delimiter" = Table.ExpandListColumn(Table.TransformColumns(#"Merged Columns", {{"Merged", Splitter.SplitTextByDelimiter(";", QuoteStyle.Csv), let itemType = (type nullable text) meta [Serialized.Text = true] in type {itemType}}}), "Merged"),
#"Added Prefix" = Table.TransformColumns(#"Split Column by Delimiter", {{"Merged", each "|" & _, type text}}),
#"Replaced Value1" = Table.ReplaceValue(#"Added Prefix","||","|",Replacer.ReplaceText,{"Merged"}),
#"Split Column by Delimiter1" = Table.SplitColumn(#"Replaced Value1", "Merged", Splitter.SplitTextByDelimiter("|", QuoteStyle.Csv), {"Merged.1", "Merged.2", "Merged.3", "Merged.4", "Merged.5", "Merged.6", "Merged.7", "Merged.8"}),
#"Removed Columns" = Table.RemoveColumns(#"Split Column by Delimiter1",{"Merged.1"}),
#"Removed Duplicates" = Table.Distinct(#"Removed Columns")
in
#"Removed Duplicates"