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.
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, SUMPRODUCT, INDEX, MATCH, LOOKUP formulas. 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).
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.
Conditional formatting is a powerful feature in Excel that is often underutilized. By using conditional formatting, you can tell Excel to highlight portions of your data that meet any given condition. For example: highlighting top 10 customers, below average performing employees etc. 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 are very familiar with various features of Pivot tables & can use them really well. Some of the advanced pivot table features are – relationships, multi-tale pivots, grouping, slicers, measures (Power Pivot) & summary by different type of metrics.
Excel’s own language – VBA, allows us to give instructions to Excel to get things done. This is a simple, but extremely powerful way to extend Excel’s functionality. Advanced users of Excel are familiar with VBA & can write macros to automate their day to day work, thus saving countless hours of time & money.
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, work-arounds, Excel customizations & how to make everything looks slick.
Excel has many powerful & advanced features packaged in to it.
Data tables: help us model practical problems & analyze massive amount of data for a solution.
Solver: helps us model practical problems & find a solution by iterating thru all possibilities. For example, finding cheapest way to ship goods from one location to another.
Simulations: We can simulate real world data & situations in Excel using various random functions & statistical methods.
Forecasting: Create time-series forecasting to analyze seasonal trends and predict future values.
Trend analysis: We can use built in functions & charting features to understand trend& forecast values from available data.
Advanced users of Excel know that when you combine the power of Excel with flexibility of other applications like MS Word, Outlook, PowerPoint, Access, SQL Server, Power BI or Web, you can achieve wonders.
They also know how to make Excel workbooks fast and bug-free.
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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