Now a days, many jobs require advanced Excel skills. Naturally, you are interested to know what are these Advanced Excel Skills? Based on my experience of training more than 10,000 students in various online & physical training programs, the following 9 areas form the core of advanced Excel skills.
Advanced Excel users know how to gather, structure & present their data so that it looks impressive. Good understanding of Excel features like Power Query (Get & Transform Data), Tables, cell styles, formatting options is necessary to make awesome Excel workbooks.
Formulas make Excel smart. With out them, Excel is just a data keeping tool. But by using formulas, you can crunch data, analyze it and get answers to most complex questions. While anyone can use a simple SUM or IF formula, an advanced user of it would be able to seamlessly write & combine formulas like SUMIFS, FILTER, XLOOKUP, IFS and other functions.
Apart from knowing the formulas, advanced Excel users know how to debug them, audit them and how to use which formula for which occasion (and they also know few alternatives for any given formula problem).
If there is one Excel feature that can turn a boring spreadsheet into an awesome productive tool, it has to be conditional formatting.
By using conditional formatting, you can tell Excel to highlight portions of your data that meet any given condition. For example,
While anyone can set up simple conditional formatting rules, an advanced Excel user can do a lot more. They can combine formulas with conditional formatting to highlight data that meets almost any condition.
Pivot tables & pivot reporting allows us to analyze massive amounts of data & answer questions with just a few clicks. Advanced users of Excel can work seamlessly with data model, table relationships, write DAX measures, use slicers and create dynamic pivot charts & reports.
There is no use if all your analysis is buried in a massive spreadsheet. Advanced users of Excel know that by using charts, we can communicate effectively and present results in a stunning manner. The skills required for advanced charting are,
Many tasks in Excel tend to be repetitive. This is where advanced Excel users know how to automate so that they can save time and look like a BOSS.
Excel offers many automation capabilities like:
The main use of Excel is to solve business problems. So you need to know how to model a business or financial situation with Excel and how to simulate real-world scenarios.
That is why advanced Excel users with modelling, business domain and statisical understanding get paid big bucks.
In order to build such models, you need below advanced Excel skills.
It is not enough to know various features of Excel. An advanced user knows how to use Excel productively. This includes knowing important keyboard shortcuts, mouse shortcuts, workarounds, Excel customizations & how to make everything looks slick.
What good is having all those advanced Excel skills, if you are bad with people, have poor understanding of the business and lack vital communication skills?
That is why any advanced Excel professional know the importance of,
To become an Advanced user in Excel, you need to have good knowledge of all the above aspects & more. This is where our training programs come in handy. Thru Chandoo.org, I have trained more than 10,000 people all over the world & made them advanced Excel users. You too can get this training and become advanced user of Excel. Click on any links to learn more.
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