Using Excel efficiently

A couple of posts ago I wrote about helping someone learn how to do VLOOKUPS and during that training, I learned how her peers at work were using Excel. Now, I do not know how many people in relative terms do not know how to use Excel: a lot of people or very few people or in between. I have no idea but there has been quite a few in the past year who has come to me to learn how to use some portion of Excel. They may know how to use the rudimentary part of Excel and they just need brush ups on specific items, maybe a certain formula or Pivot Tables.

But for someone who has used Excel all of her working life, it is shocking how some people do use Excel. Again, I don’t know if this is extremely rare, which I hope so, or it is actually more common this inefficient use of Excel.

So, with this person, her peers would come in everyday and download some information from their computer system and then perform the same VLOOKUPS all day long. It sounded like they do the same thing day after day without ever reusing a spreadsheet to do the same work. It is like the spreadsheet from the prior day is thrown out and a totally new spreadsheet, with the same sort of formulas, is created anew each day. That is what the story sounds like.

Maybe I misunderstood what this person was saying. I didn’t get a chance to probe later to see if I understood because my work was done, so I will never know what her peers were truly doing.

I guess the lesson to learn from this is that there may be a lot of people who may not be using Excel in an efficient and proficient way. It kind of boggles my mind that they wouldn’t think of reusing the spreadsheet to do the job but maybe some people need to be shown that before they get what they can do with Excel.

But I do worry that there are a lot of jobs now requiring some basic knowledge of Excel and some people don’t ever learn this or too scared to learn Excel. I am hoping that most places that are asking for such knowledge (outside of finance, science and engineering, maybe even marketing) are really looking for just the basics. I can teach them VLOOKUPS and pivot tables (as a matter of fact, I recently just showed somebody those two items) and if they already have a familiarity with spreadsheets, they do pick it up very quickly – like the person I recently taught.

But it is a scary world now. Currently, finance people say that they really don’t need to know how to code. But what if in the future that changes with students in college learning how to program as a basic part of their education, like reading, writing and arithmetic? As a matter of fact, I have spoken to some of the younger finance professionals where they have indicated that they found it was helpful to know coding.

Just putting that thought out there.