It’s a metaphor for people that “apply themselves” and the people that don’t.
Every “excel guy/gal” was created by solving a problem. Excel will always be integral to business no matter how much people shit on it.
I took several, manual routines, copy paste re-run calcs, copy results paste elsewhere ad nauseam - and automated them with VBA. Shrunk a 1 hour long process down to 1 min. It requires the mentality “I’m going to put myself through the wringer and spend many hours on this, so that no one has to do this ever again”.
It eventually morphs from “excel guy/gal” to “process guy/gal” and from there it’s wherever you want it to go if you keep applying that mindset.
Yep, every place I've worked there's been some ridiculous manual bullshit that people do just because "that's how we've always done it."
In my last job, they were printing out copies of account balances each day and manually checking them against the previous days to detect any changes. After doing it literally the first day, I thought fuck this, there is DEFINITELY a quicker way of doing this.
Ended up fixing it so that excel would just automatically highlight any cell that had changed from the previous day, saving probably close to an hour a day.
When I showed my colleague, she basically just didn't care. When I went off on leave for a week, she resorted to doing it manually again. People infuriate me lmao.
Something similar happened to me. Coworkers mocked me for “fancy pivot” use, after I automated tasks that we spent hours on, every single day. I’m barely even intermediate.
To be fair, there are strong arguments for doing it their way:
1. You get asked to do fewer tasks when everything takes longer. Expectations matter.
2. You're not paid extra for finding a more efficient process, and likely won't be promoted either.
3. Since people don't know what Excel can do, the attitude of finding efficiencies can backfire. You're bound to run into something that can't be made more efficient in Excel, and need a much more powerful tool, like a database or actual stats software. Those cost money, and when you try to explain why Excel and their current framework can't handle that, you won't be believed and are just holding your true knowledge hostage.
If you're going to be on this path anyway, IME the best way to go about it is make a fraction of stuff more efficient and use that to get a better job elsewhere. Rinse and repeat.
If management treats you badly or always fails to recognise and reward your achievements...then this is the answer. Especially in this new working from home world.
Source: I manage people. I used to be managed.
And wait until there's an error just once in your excel. You get a shitload even if generally the error rate has dropped to 1 % compared to manual process.
I've explained to people exactly what I did and why only to explain it again and again, even basic things like keyboard shortcuts. I can't see them ever knowing how more advanced formulas work or that you can pull data from one sheet into another.
Recently one of them started editing an Excel file that was working perfectly fine and ruined it so I ended having to go in early before my shift to fix it, took me 2 hours to get it right.
I've told my boss that we waste so much time doing things that could be automated and if I had access to the database I could easily do it, instead we have to enter data from the database into excel files.
I take the other approach. I take the time to show people who are interested how to put the formula together. Then I'm not bothered all the time with simple excel requests
because effort isn't always rewarded, instead people get fired and let go and given more work without any pay raises
it's different when you are paid well and when you are bottom of the barrel
do it but don't tell anyone if it doesn't pay
I started a new job and my predecessor was generating attendance sheet for 40+ classes per week, by "hand". As soon as she showed me how to do it I was like: "Alright, when you're coming back from mat leave it's not gonna be like that anymore." What an amazing waste of time it was holy shit. Fixed that within two weeks with VBA and this sub's help.
Now I'm the excel guy.
Man, it is bonkers. In this day and age for people to be printing stuff and manually comparing it etc. And when the automated solutions are literally a Google search away...
That's the problem, they don't even know enough to search the problem correctly, or if its a solution that needs a little bit of tweaking it's beyond them
It sounds snobby but I honestly think it's an intelligence issue. Some people have no idea how to improvise or solve any kinds of problems
It’s a mindset thing. Some people have the mentality of “here’s a problem I don’t know the answers to, but I’ll find a way to solve it” others just think “fuck that” and carry on with the way they’ve been shown, regardless of how inefficient or stupid it is.
I’m the “Excel guy” at my office. People want to know how I know so much. I tell them Google is your friend. The trick is knowing how to ask the question to find the answer. Some people don’t know how to ask the question.
I think some people don't want to speed up their work because they are comfortable with what they currently do and are afraid that if their 40 hrs of work only takes 5 hrs they will be out of a job.
We just did a massive QoE audit at work and, not joking, I couldn’t get a colleague to use the sum copy function.
They were screaming about how it would take weeks. I mean, it was mind numbing but only took me about 16 hours to do 100% of AR and client data, plus about 80% of AP.
Major epiphany here Hawk. What if the reason nobody sends excel is because they aren’t excel people, instead of a nefarious plot.
You’re giving me ideas on a uniform request template.
I’ve been asking the ai for ideas. Thank you for the spark. Sincerely.
I experienced this 2 jobs ago. When I first started, my "supervisor" was doing this task that would take him several hours each week and I was like fuck that. I spent a few days cooking and came up with a better way to do the task and made it even more accurate. I showed it to him and he was like "let's do it my way". I then knew the type of person I was working it so I stopped pitching ideas to him and found opportunities to work with others instead.
Fast forward to a year later we got some changes in management and we both reported to the same boss. The boss recognized my skills right away and put them in good used. At one point, I got to work with the clients director of administration and implemented ways to revamp their data management system. I believe i was at my creative peak then. I ended up stuck doing what would take 3 people to do manually. When I asked for a raise/promotion, they refused and only gave me a small bonus so I left (my boss definitely vouched for my raise but politics got in the way). So yeah, being the excel guy can get you places, or you can also get stuck doing something forever because you're the only who knows how to do it. Make sure you get compensated appropriately!
Edit: some grammar here and there.
> When I asked for a raise/promotion, they refused and only gave me a small bonus
I am dealing with this exact same situation right now. I've literally done things no one else in the business can do, asked for raise, they've taken 12 weeks to even get back to me and I believe I'm not going to get what I asked for.
The business is massively better off thanks to me and now I almost wish I never bothered.
That sucks. Are you maintaining/running the tools you created? Is that something that can be done without you being there? Say if you took a week or two off, would people miss you?
The stuff I created was so complicated (not by choice, I just make things up as I go and I'm definitely not the best at it.. but it works!) that I was the only that knew how to run lol - bad practice i know but it wasn't my problem.
I am not an excel guy but I am a problem solver and am always looking for efficiency in everyday tasks. I think some people just get offended or feel insulted that this way, the only way they have done this task they hate and sank so much time into could have been avoided by simply using a tool or method they weren’t aware of. Initial reactions are anger or frustration and they double down on their way because they have to prove to themselves they were right all along. Or maybe they are just too set in their ways. Either or. Finding someone who is accepting of change right away is rare in my experience.
I think they are afraid, if a simpler way to do their job appears, then they will be asked to do more tasks. If suddenly that way bottle necks or something, they will still have to do the extra work. People like being comfortable. If they are great at how it was done, then they dont want to try something new just to do it. Also they do have a reasonable fear of possibly being replaced by an excel sheet as well.
It was a few years ago but I think it was literally just conditional formatting between the two sheets. Without jumping on my pc and actually trying it I'm not sure, but if you googled it or asked chatGPT I'm sure you'd get a decent answer.
MATCHINDEX, with a sprinkling of dropdown lists, is fully half of my magic.
Today I discovered XMATCH (in reverse search) for finding the first period a person was not paid, to reverse engineer their starting week.
You can do that using VBA - CHATGPT will give you the code with the right prompts. I have a script that colors cells red that are lower than last save and green for those that have increased.
I can give more info if you’re interested.
I think I have experienced the mother of this stuff. I was doing contracting for the federal government putting together an analytics and reporting system. There was a ton of low hanging fruit. The one that blew me away was a woman who's entire job was printing out a green bar report, burst it into the appropriate sections and place the sections into the mailbox of the various department heads. We developed a report that ran and sent the appropriate report to each department head's email box. They also had the option to run the report on demand. We felt pretty good about his particular part of the solution. Hell, we even duplicated the green bar appearance.
Now came my real government contracting education. This woman went to her boss and complained that what we delivered didn't do what she needed. She wanted the new system to print out the old green bar report so she could burst and distribute it. Suffice it to say, that after a long and tense meeting, we recreated her green bar report. The hardest part was getting the reporting system to talk to a dinosaur printer. She was happy and the world started rotating again. I found out later that she retired in two years and that report was her sole responsibility.
Accountant here. Everything you said above is how you progress in your career. Now you need to move into an industry where someone can see the good work that you're doing and getting paid for it.
I remember a co-worker logging in folders using a hand laser scanner. For some reason the entry for the cells would move to the right instead of down after scanning a folder. So after every folder she would have to set the scanner down, use the down and left arrow, then scan the next folder.
I changed a setting and she could scan an entire box in just a couple minutes. I think she actually got pissed at me because I turned 8 hours worth of work into less than an hour and she was going to have to find some other work to fill the rest of her day.
I learned to keep my Excel to myself. People don't appreciate or understand any innovations you bring to them and doing working conspicuously efficiently just gets you more work.
>eventually morphs from “excel guy/gal” to “process guy/gal”
If often doesn't. Or rather they never grow out of Excel. Excel is incredibly powerful, but this also makes it very dangerous for many companies. More often than not I see "Excel people" that never knew when to stop using Excel and eventually companies have mission critical shit running on a workbook made 10 years ago and the creator is long gone. God forbid something happen to that. I'm actually working on a blog post right now where the gist of it is "is your Excel person endangering your company?"
There's nothing wrong with being the "Excel person"--hell, that's kinda how I started--but unless you evolve into the "data person" by learning the practical limits of Excel and new tools like Fabric, Python, Airflow, SQL, or whatever, you might be putting your company at risk with poor continuity planning. If you get hit by a bus, or MSFT pushes some update that breaks a legacy formula you were using, or whatever, your company might be forced to hire a consulting firm like ours to clean it up. I like what I do, but I don't want to see clients in distress. It's much easier for me to do a transformation rather than a cleanup.
I love Excel and use it every day, but there are some things it can do that you should think twice before making it do. Just this week I got a report from a client's "BI team" that was a workbook with something like nine hidden sheets with a bunch of helper columns, a good amount of VBA, and an instruction page that used 2,000 rows of text and screen shots to show how to copy and paste the source data from two phone systems into Excel to light up the report. Recreating this in Fabric would be an afternoon's worth of work and it would be completely automated. This isn't a small company, either. This is a \~$5B organization. Insane.
My manager at a F250 company spends about half his working hours pulling reports and copy totals into his tracking sheet. I have all the same reports and made a dashboard using power query that added new data daily using Power Automate. Guess who lost access to Power Automate and got told "that's not what we pay you to do"?
All you had to do was hit the "refresh" button and the rest was automatic. I spent 4 hours on a Saturday doing it.
We also hired a global data manager for my department who is a self proclaimed excel guy. He doesn't know other programs/tools yet. I showed him how to make a table and use Filters last month.
F
As shitty as it sounds, many of my engagements are with companies that employ people like you and for some reason they'd rather hear the same answer from consultants that they've been hearing from their employees for years. It's fucking stupid and I feel for you, but I always love those engagements because I get to work with progressive-minded people like yourself and do next to nothing. I never pass off employee work as my own since the data thing is only half my job. The other half is operationalizing the data. So, it feels good to assure an exec they have a good data team and then I use their material to change ops.
>they’d rather hear the same answer from consultants that they’ve been hearing from their employees for years
Sounds like all consulting gigs. Why would my employee know if I never trained them to know? This consultant is expensive, so they must know
My jaw opened reading this.
Didn’t know how to make a table???? LOL.
No knock on anyone who doesn’t know, but if you proclaim to be an excel guy, there’s no way you skipped table.
Edit: excellent to excel.
I get that completely. It's knowing the difference in needing a spreadsheet or a database. The work I do literally doesn't warrant anything more than the odd spreadsheet at a time. It's normally for a fixed amount of data that is never going to increase or become more complicated than pulling a few figures here and there. But I do totally get you and agree.
Yeah, that's a great usecase and you are fine doing that. Just watch out for the feature creep because one day you may wake up and realize you just built a full ERP in Excel lol. I use it for prototyping and ad hoc bullshit. But if I know a process isn't a one off and will become a regular occurrence, I'll try pushing stakeholders toward a more scalable solution even if it requires a bit more effort on the frontend. It's worth it in the long run.
This is my fear honestly so any advice you have, please give it. I’ve become the excel person at my job but my powers have been seen and now I’m becoming the data person with very little experience. I’ve learned SQL and we use a software with consultants who have built the databases for us. But there’s a lot of data I need to maintain that won’t be going into those SQL databases. I’d consider myself very advanced at excel and I’m an engineer by schooling so I’m smart, I just don’t know where to begin.
Honestly just start small. When I was making a simple dashboard to pull certain data, I started off by just wanting one figure. Then my manager asked can we break it down into X and Y info. So I added another couple of formulas to pull that info. Then it gradually just became more in depth from there.
Google and chatGPT are very helpful. ChatGPT isn't always correct, but you can be as specific as possible and it at least knows what you're trying to accomplish, which has saved me so much time opening loads of stack overflow threads that don't answer my question.
Just do it one step at a time. I'm sure you've got this.
Without knowing anything about your environment this will be high-level, but if you can get your data into SQL and it makes sense in SQL, do it. Look into some kind of ingestion routine that takes the files and puts them into tables. Python, Power Automate, Fabric, whatever you have access to. If you can't do that, SharePoint makes for a pretty good ghetto datalake. From there use Power Query to connect to your data and load only what you need in Excel.
Also, download Power BI and play with it. It also uses Power Query although there are some slight variations between the implementation in Excel and Power BI (and Fabric dataflows, FWIW). ChatGPT-4--specifically Analyst GPT which is a custom GPT made by someone over on r/powerbi --works really well as long as you are good with your prompts. It will also help you with SQL and Python.
If you do go the Power BI route, keep in mind there are things that are easy in Excel but challenging in Power BI and vice versa. Getting used to not having cells is usually the hardest thing for people moving from spreadsheets to a BI tool.
I try to tell everybody in my department if you’re working with the Microsoft Office platform and you need a solution where the process involves doing something repetitively over and over again VBA will do it in a fraction of the time. They never believe me. I spend a couple hours designing an algorithm to do whatever they want, give it to them and something that takes three or four hours to process now become something that takes two minutes to process. Minds are always completely blown.
This could so be me. I had to write a daily email detailing the previous day's numbers. "Keep it sounding interesting, and not flat" was the ask. So a few random word choices attached to however far apart the percentage values are with a great deal of concat work and my 1-hour chore is done in 5 minutes to import the raw data. Five years later, everyone still assumes I write things like "Yesterday's numbers in GLP were nearly 12% higher than forecast, due to significantly lower AHT times from the four reporting teams."
The thing that frustrates me? I can literally spend days putting together some incredible mathematical modeling that interactively can do things in minutes that took a team of 3 almost a week to put together... and they think that the conditional formatting that changes depending what time you put in cell B1 is the best thing ever.
This is exactly how I tackle things. I spend hours trying to get formulas and sheets to link together so that going forward my reporting takes 5 minutes.
I need to learn VBA. Have no idea what it is or how to use it.
For anyone that thinks this sounds like you, remember it next time you're interviewing for a job. This is an incredible way to turn just another skill listed at the bottom of your resume into the perfect response to the typical "tell me about yourself" or "what's your biggest strength."
edit: typos
God damn well said. The idea of turning solving an arduous task with Excel into being process oriented is a reallllly great spin for interviews, and moreover great way to approach your job
I became the Excel guy for my department about seven years ago, and then learned VBA and was able to make entire program programs to help my department , realized I love programming and now I know syntax for VBA, SQL, Python 3, c++, Java power bi, HTML5, CSS3 I have certification and relational database management. Because of Excel explicitly VBA I am in the process of becoming a full stack developer. It’s a slippery slope. 😂
VBA is an awesome language to learn because it gives you a platform to work off of instead of having to create the platform yourself. it’s a very marketable knowledge set and there’s many things I can do simply because I know VBA. Smaller companies are not looking for IT executives. They’re looking for individuals that can do awesome things with limited resources because they don’t have tons of money and the Microsoft office platform offers that.
Exactly. “Professional” data analyst people turn their noses up at Excel. Treating it like the Fisher Price My First DataSet tool. You know what everyone has though? Microsoft Excel. It’s guaranteed availability and compatibility.
Be-careful, LLM's make mistakes. You still need to know the basics and review what they give you.
[New York lawyers sanctioned for using fake ChatGPT cases in legal brief](https://www.reuters.com/legal/new-york-lawyers-sanctioned-using-fake-chatgpt-cases-legal-brief-2023-06-22/)
I used to be the "Excel guru" in an old job back before I knew how to do half the things I know now. What is the phrase, "in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king"?
Everyone claims they know how to use Excel, but what they really mean is they know how to open Excel and type something in a cell, maybe change the colour and/or size of the text. 99% of people can’t do anything more interesting than a SUM.
This is so true. I used Alt + = to perform addition and trust me, all were baffled. Folks literally used a calculator to see whether the output was accurate or not.
looked a someones script, broke it down, re-created it from scratch, i now learned how to create custom buttons to plus minus, while adding numbers into a square, so simply put, its a basket ball score sheet with buttons added foul button 1 point foul shots, 2 pointer and 3 pointer
if miss clicked, a minus to remove score if did not count =)
added home team and away team to look like a score board
https://preview.redd.it/zj8cxq1zovwc1.png?width=1702&format=png&auto=webp&s=f6372bcc19c05ce23dcfb7ef63f23b12b475b8dc
dang it BOSS!
fine, I'll comply
added some points for flavor
https://preview.redd.it/ipnp17p5dwwc1.png?width=1762&format=png&auto=webp&s=cb654967e590970c1dca460ffdae2a24516d470c
People say they "know how to use Excel" in the same way they know how to drive a car. They can interface with it and do basic tasks like driving from A to B, but they don't understand how it works, how to diagnose/fix problems, or how to customize it to fit a particular need while ensuring it runs reliably.
The most they ever look under the hood is when they check the oil to confirm it looks the way they're used to it looking.
My boss and I use each other as rubber duckies on a somewhat daily basis.
Especially when I'm trying to make sure shit like the following work correctly.
=IF(IFERROR(INDIRECT(CONCAT(VLOOKUP(IF(YEAR(TODAY())=$A$5,MONTH(TODAY()),12),MonthCode,2),"[TS_YTD]")),INDIRECT(CONCAT(VLOOKUP(IF(YEAR(TODAY())=$A$5,MONTH(TODAY())-1,12),MonthCode,2),"[TS_YTD]")))=0,"",IFERROR(INDIRECT(CONCAT(VLOOKUP(IF(YEAR(TODAY())=$A$5,MONTH(TODAY()),12),MonthCode,2),"[TS_YTD]")),INDIRECT(CONCAT(VLOOKUP(IF(YEAR(TODAY())=$A$5,MONTH(TODAY())-1,12),MonthCode,2),"[TS_YTD]"))))
Was trying to remember where my longest nested formula I've ever made resides but I'm pretty sure this isn't it.
Sunken cost from people that came before me that I had to iterate on.
This has been phased out as we've moved entirely to an actual Oracle SQL database.
Sure, here's a condensed version of the Excel formula:
```excel
=IF(
IFERROR(
INDIRECT(CONCAT(VLOOKUP(IF(YEAR(TODAY())=$A$5,MONTH(TODAY()),12), MonthCode, 2), "[TS_YTD]")),
INDIRECT(CONCAT(VLOOKUP(IF(YEAR(TODAY())=$A$5,MONTH(TODAY())-1,12), MonthCode, 2), "[TS_YTD]"))
) = 0,
"",
IFERROR(
INDIRECT(CONCAT(VLOOKUP(IF(YEAR(TODAY())=$A$5,MONTH(TODAY()),12), MonthCode, 2), "[TS_YTD]")),
INDIRECT(CONCAT(VLOOKUP(IF(YEAR(TODAY())=$A$5,MONTH(TODAY())-1,12), MonthCode, 2), "[TS_YTD]"))
)
)
```
This condensed version maintains the structure and logic of the original formula while making it easier to read and understand.
Indirect is niche but clutch. I don’t need it often but when I do, boy howdy.
I also learned that you can reference tab names and then have that get inserted into indirect functions, which was a godsend when I needed to build 100 identical worksheets to break down named subgroups of my data (think group 1, group 2, etc). I could just copy the tab and rename it and build the whole workbook super fast.
I got mad at a dumb manual process and made a tool for the fortune 50 company I work at and people shit their pants. I just rolled it out to the national network. I googled the whole thing into existence. I feel like the dog doing science meme
This is me. Literally just Google a lot until it works, or chatGPT some very specific examples. But I've got to say, it's worked. Made me more confident with formulas and the more I practice the easier it gets.
Yeah it’s awesome to be able to use time to figure it out in a practical application and have people be stoked about it. I get to develop my skills and help people get out of arduous tasks. It’s a win win situation
Use conditional formatting next, it'll blow their minds!
I'm the go-to person for spreadsheets or any IT questions. Except printers, those buggers hate me, and I hate them.
I like to make spreadsheets as automated as possible with pretty colours. I was once dubbed "the spreadsheet queen," and now it's a running joke.
ETA: I'm self taught, don't really use VBA and tend to forget how to do things of not used for a while, but I'm good at solving problems and figuring out useful formulas for solutions.
Love conditional formatting. It was one of the first things I looked up when trying to do some stuff on a spreadsheet a few years ago. Mainly simple stuff like if any cells in a certain column contain "Yes", then fill the row in green sort of shit.
It's my cheat to visualize a schedule of operations. You can plug the start and conplete date and it'll draw a beautiful line on the calendar, then highlight today's column.
You can also use conditional formatting to torment people. If the text equals a name turn the text white and make it dissappear. Or replace it with different spelling. Maybe change a key formula or tilt the title bar 2 degrees. Shrink all the text. There are still sheets out there I have made that refuse to work for anyone named "Mike" 🙃
I fixed the conditional formatting on the office workstation booking spreadsheet to warn people of double booking and I added a grey-out shading that automatically helps guide your eyes towards today's date (because I was tired of searching, lol)
And I made paid day off holidays show up automatically with yellow highlights.
Next, I need to come up with a non-macro automated button to refresh the conditional formatting rules after people mess it up by copy-pasting the wrong way.
I had the complete opposite. Thought I had versatile knowledge before starting at my current job - oh wow how wrong I was.
Learned that XLOOKUP was a company norm instead of VLOOKUP, INDEX MATCH used consequetively in very long formulas in every file, HSTACK and VSTACK were almost considered basic even though I’d never even heard of those functions, and Query/VBA was always the way to go when things got too complicated.
Safe to say I’ve learned 10x more than I ever learned from my previous 2 jobs and 6 years of studying. Great to have smart people around you.
I once showed an older colleague that he can use VLOOKUP instead of manually looking up a value in one table, memorising it, clicking open another table and typing that value into a cell (rinse and repeat x 1000).
So because I bothered to Google the issue once and watched a 10 minute YouTube tutorial to learn VLOOKUP, I am now the excel warlock who just may have to burn at the stake for all my dangerous excel witchcraft.
He did, but that copied also formatting from the source table and "made the target table look messy", so his way was clearly superior. I did try to show him how to only paste values, but that involved something other than right clicking and then clicking the part he is used to clicking, which again is pure sorcery and herecy. And God forbid using filthy keyboard shortcuts!
I once worked at a government agency where the “computer gal” spent three or four days every week manually coloring Excel rows in a large spreadsheet based on a numeric value in one of the columns. I showed her the simple conditional formatting formula that accomplished this process in seconds. She continued to do it the manual way.
Oh man, I make worksheets that are a bit more convoluted but nowhere near the level of expertise as some of these people on here. I consider it a modest understanding of Excel formulas.
But wow, it's like I'm speaking a foreign language to these folks. So yeah, job security, I guess. Nobody else knows how to use COUNTIF or XLOOKUP, much less stuff like WORKDAYS and INDEX/MATCH. I would never be able to explain SUMPRODUCT to them (though honestly I have an Achilles Heel with it that I simply cannot put into words).
I don't even tap into VBA that much, which is a testament to how robust Excel is.
I made the mistake of letting the calculated mediocrity I've maintained for years slip a couple weeks ago, now I'm the computer guy soon-to-be-promoted to programmer for factory lines worth millions......I don't know how to write code and have slightly above average computer skills. I've told them I can't actually code, but apparently making basic excel sheets is good enough for them.
Spill functions blow people's minds. First time I slapped a FILTER on something in the middle of a conference call people were like "What the heck is that?!"
My first job as a trainee structural engineer I was given the most basic and repetitive structural elements to design. I was asked to design all of the lintels for a development of 20 houses, the boss expected this to take me 1-2 weeks.
It took me 1 day to learn the process and design 1 house. I had taken an Excel class in school so at the end of the 1st day I built a simple spreadsheet to calculate the load on a lintel, and then compare it to the load capacity for various gauge lintels using a clumsy nested IF formula (which was about the limit of my Excel skills back then).
Next morning the boss said he would check my designs for the 1 house I had completed, but he told me that I needed to pick up the pace a little to hit the deadline of 2 weeks. By the time he came back to me after lunch I had finished the entire task using my spreadsheet. He was both surprised and a little irritated because he now had to find me another task, so he asked me to tally up all the lintel types in a Bill of Materials, probably just to keep me occupied. I used google to find out how to summarise data, found out about Pivot Tables and added that to the spreadsheet.
10 years later I had made a spreadsheet for almost every engineering design task I encountered. Eventually I had a suite of design tools which could output all the necessary calculations plus some diagrams and graphs to form a package of calculations. All the other engineers wanted the spreadsheets to relieve them of the more repetitive aspects of the job, so I became the Excel guy.
The only bad thing about that title is users asking you to make changes to the spreadsheets which are incredibly niche use cases which would require an extensive rewrite of the code. Can I rework this to save you a 10 minute task which might arise every few years? Yes, but i'm not going to spend a couple of evenings to do it.
[relevant xkcd](https://xkcd.com/1205)
I have come to the conclusion, based on years of experience -- and this doesn't apply just to Excel or other Office products, but across the entire workforce -- that people just have no desire to learn how to work more efficiently.
Basically, it's the same with me. I used a sumif and created a pivot table on a spreadsheet I shared, and now im the spreadsheet guy, the IT guy, and anything that has to do with data analytics. All I do is ask chatgpt for the formulas I need and I make bank doing it. I love my job.
My department was given a massive spreadsheet and I was tasked to find all the individual order numbers.
I just used the UNIQUE formula to output, then Ctrl, Shift, Down to count it and what took a colleague 2.5 hours just took me 10 seconds.
It's always the simplest stories that are the coolest.
For me my company had a spreadsheet that referenced a range. Every once in a while someone would type in a cell which didn't allow it to spill over it. We would send it to IT and operations for that would stop until a couple days later when they would send it fixed.
One day I decided to look at the file with no real hope. I happened to notice a single cell with something in it while all the other ones were blank. I deleted the number and boom, magic. The range worked again. You would think I had shown a magic trick to little kids by their reactions
I had a similar situation happen too when I joined a new team. There was a spreadsheet where they would enter a number and another cell would join text to add a bunch of 0's to fit a format. It would break all the time and by break I mean the cell with the formula would reach a row it wasn't in OR a hidden row next to it reached a point with the 0's weren't no longer in and they would send this to IT to fix.
I took it upon myself to remove the hidden row and have one reference point to '000000000'. Then I immediately protected the column with the formula so no one could accidentally type in it.
That was a lot of words to say: lock your formulas!
In an interview 15 years ago, my (near retirement) boss-to-be asked me to rate my Excel skills from 1-10. Trying to be modest, I said 7-8.
He came back with “well if you know how to do an IF statement, you’re a 10 in my book.” I just laughed and said yeah I know how to do them, but in my head I was thinking that IF statements was a 10, I was a 15.
Anyway, if I would have been more experienced, I would have known to run for the hills. The level of technical knowledge in general in that company was basically at the level of struggling to do Sums in Excel.
I ended up being a semi-IT guy along with my regular job, which I of course didn’t get any extra pay for.
I’m the excel girl at my new job. Admittedly I’ve learned a ton of excel functions since I started, and I’m pretty impressed with myself. My coworkers and managers know very little excel and are continuously shocked at what I can do. They are very appreciative and it also earned me a raise within a few weeks of starting. I was able to build a report no one else could, that ended up netting is a substantial rebate. And now I’m just obsessed with what else I can improve.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
|Fewer Letters|More Letters|
|-------|---------|---|
|[AVERAGEIFS](/r/Excel/comments/1cdsr2q/stub/l1exd5t "Last usage")|[*Excel 2007*+: Returns the average (arithmetic mean) of all cells that meet multiple criteria.](https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/averageifs-function-48910c45-1fc0-4389-a028-f7c5c3001690)|
|[CONCAT](/r/Excel/comments/1cdsr2q/stub/l1g8am9 "Last usage")|[*2019*+: Combines the text from multiple ranges and/or strings, but it doesn't provide the delimiter or IgnoreEmpty arguments.](https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/concat-function-9b1a9a3f-94ff-41af-9736-694cbd6b4ca2)|
|[CONCATENATE](/r/Excel/comments/1cdsr2q/stub/l1fg1fi "Last usage")|[Joins several text items into one text item](https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/concatenate-function-8f8ae884-2ca8-4f7a-b093-75d702bea31d)|
|[COUNT](/r/Excel/comments/1cdsr2q/stub/l1f8t6b "Last usage")|[Counts how many numbers are in the list of arguments](https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/count-function-a59cd7fc-b623-4d93-87a4-d23bf411294c)|
|[COUNTA](/r/Excel/comments/1cdsr2q/stub/l1fra1j "Last usage")|[Counts how many values are in the list of arguments](https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/counta-function-7dc98875-d5c1-46f1-9a82-53f3219e2509)|
|[COUNTIF](/r/Excel/comments/1cdsr2q/stub/l1oe7h7 "Last usage")|[Counts the number of cells within a range that meet the given criteria](https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/countif-function-e0de10c6-f885-4e71-abb4-1f464816df34)|
|[COUNTIFS](/r/Excel/comments/1cdsr2q/stub/l1oe7h7 "Last usage")|[*Excel 2007*+: Counts the number of cells within a range that meet multiple criteria](https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/countifs-function-dda3dc6e-f74e-4aee-88bc-aa8c2a866842)|
|[DB](/r/Excel/comments/1cdsr2q/stub/l1ig2rw "Last usage")|[Returns the depreciation of an asset for a specified period by using the fixed-declining balance method](https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/db-function-354e7d28-5f93-4ff1-8a52-eb4ee549d9d7)|
|[FILTER](/r/Excel/comments/1cdsr2q/stub/l1j3jn1 "Last usage")|[*Office 365*+: Filters a range of data based on criteria you define](https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/filter-function-f4f7cb66-82eb-4767-8f7c-4877ad80c759)|
|[FIND](/r/Excel/comments/1cdsr2q/stub/l1fg1fi "Last usage")|[Finds one text value within another (case-sensitive)](https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/find-findb-functions-c7912941-af2a-4bdf-a553-d0d89b0a0628)|
|[HSTACK](/r/Excel/comments/1cdsr2q/stub/l1ej19v "Last usage")|[*Office 365*+: Appends arrays horizontally and in sequence to return a larger array](https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/hstack-function-98c4ab76-10fe-4b4f-8d5f-af1c125fe8c2)|
|[IF](/r/Excel/comments/1cdsr2q/stub/l1j7v4a "Last usage")|[Specifies a logical test to perform](https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/if-function-69aed7c9-4e8a-4755-a9bc-aa8bbff73be2)|
|[IFERROR](/r/Excel/comments/1cdsr2q/stub/l1lxpe8 "Last usage")|[Returns a value you specify if a formula evaluates to an error; otherwise, returns the result of the formula](https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/iferror-function-c526fd07-caeb-47b8-8bb6-63f3e417f611)|
|[INDEX](/r/Excel/comments/1cdsr2q/stub/l1hwn59 "Last usage")|[Uses an index to choose a value from a reference or array](https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/index-function-a5dcf0dd-996d-40a4-a822-b56b061328bd)|
|[INDIRECT](/r/Excel/comments/1cdsr2q/stub/l1g8am9 "Last usage")|[Returns a reference indicated by a text value](https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/indirect-function-474b3a3a-8a26-4f44-b491-92b6306fa261)|
|[ISNUMBER](/r/Excel/comments/1cdsr2q/stub/l1fg1fi "Last usage")|[Returns TRUE if the value is a number](https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/is-functions-0f2d7971-6019-40a0-a171-f2d869135665)|
|[LET](/r/Excel/comments/1cdsr2q/stub/l1eytbi "Last usage")|[*Office 365*+: Assigns names to calculation results to allow storing intermediate calculations, values, or defining names inside a formula](https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/let-function-34842dd8-b92b-4d3f-b325-b8b8f9908999)|
|[MATCH](/r/Excel/comments/1cdsr2q/stub/l1hwn59 "Last usage")|[Looks up values in a reference or array](https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/match-function-e8dffd45-c762-47d6-bf89-533f4a37673a)|
|[MAX](/r/Excel/comments/1cdsr2q/stub/l1f8koo "Last usage")|[Returns the maximum value in a list of arguments](https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/max-function-e0012414-9ac8-4b34-9a47-73e662c08098)|
|[MIN](/r/Excel/comments/1cdsr2q/stub/l1f8koo "Last usage")|[Returns the minimum value in a list of arguments](https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/min-function-61635d12-920f-4ce2-a70f-96f202dcc152)|
|[MOD](/r/Excel/comments/1cdsr2q/stub/l1j4n3i "Last usage")|[Returns the remainder from division](https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/mod-function-9b6cd169-b6ee-406a-a97b-edf2a9dc24f3)|
|[MONTH](/r/Excel/comments/1cdsr2q/stub/l1g8am9 "Last usage")|[Converts a serial number to a month](https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/month-function-579a2881-199b-48b2-ab90-ddba0eba86e8)|
|[OR](/r/Excel/comments/1cdsr2q/stub/l1f3n4g "Last usage")|[Returns TRUE if any argument is TRUE](https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/or-function-7d17ad14-8700-4281-b308-00b131e22af0)|
|[SEARCH](/r/Excel/comments/1cdsr2q/stub/l1fg1fi "Last usage")|[Finds one text value within another (not case-sensitive)](https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/search-searchb-functions-9ab04538-0e55-4719-a72e-b6f54513b495)|
|[SUM](/r/Excel/comments/1cdsr2q/stub/l1hfh3d "Last usage")|[Adds its arguments](https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/sum-function-043e1c7d-7726-4e80-8f32-07b23e057f89)|
|[SUMIF](/r/Excel/comments/1cdsr2q/stub/l1h705s "Last usage")|[Adds the cells specified by a given criteria](https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/sumif-function-169b8c99-c05c-4483-a712-1697a653039b)|
|[SUMIFS](/r/Excel/comments/1cdsr2q/stub/l1ifsz7 "Last usage")|[*Excel 2007*+: Adds the cells in a range that meet multiple criteria](https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/sumifs-function-c9e748f5-7ea7-455d-9406-611cebce642b)|
|[SUMPRODUCT](/r/Excel/comments/1cdsr2q/stub/l1hgbox "Last usage")|[Returns the sum of the products of corresponding array components](https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/sumproduct-function-16753e75-9f68-4874-94ac-4d2145a2fd2e)|
|[TIME](/r/Excel/comments/1cdsr2q/stub/l1fjvbd "Last usage")|[Returns the serial number of a particular time](https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/time-function-9a5aff99-8f7d-4611-845e-747d0b8d5457)|
|[TODAY](/r/Excel/comments/1cdsr2q/stub/l1g8am9 "Last usage")|[Returns the serial number of today's date](https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/today-function-5eb3078d-a82c-4736-8930-2f51a028fdd9)|
|[UNIQUE](/r/Excel/comments/1cdsr2q/stub/l1edx3u "Last usage")|[*Office 365*+: Returns a list of unique values in a list or range](https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/unique-function-c5ab87fd-30a3-4ce9-9d1a-40204fb85e1e)|
|[VLOOKUP](/r/Excel/comments/1cdsr2q/stub/l1ma0gy "Last usage")|[Looks in the first column of an array and moves across the row to return the value of a cell](https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/vlookup-function-0bbc8083-26fe-4963-8ab8-93a18ad188a1)|
|[VSTACK](/r/Excel/comments/1cdsr2q/stub/l1ej19v "Last usage")|[*Office 365*+: Appends arrays vertically and in sequence to return a larger array](https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/vstack-function-a4b86897-be0f-48fc-adca-fcc10d795a9c)|
|[XLOOKUP](/r/Excel/comments/1cdsr2q/stub/l1ibie6 "Last usage")|[*Office 365*+: Searches a range or an array, and returns an item corresponding to the first match it finds. If a match doesn't exist, then XLOOKUP can return the closest (approximate) match. ](https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/xlookup-function-b7fd680e-6d10-43e6-84f9-88eae8bf5929)|
|[XMATCH](/r/Excel/comments/1cdsr2q/stub/l1ggcyt "Last usage")|[*Office 365*+: Returns the relative position of an item in an array or range of cells. ](https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/xmatch-function-d966da31-7a6b-4a13-a1c6-5a33ed6a0312)|
|[YEAR](/r/Excel/comments/1cdsr2q/stub/l1g8am9 "Last usage")|[Converts a serial number to a year](https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/year-function-c64f017a-1354-490d-981f-578e8ec8d3b9)|
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I'm an intern, and they had me covering for our L&D admin position when ours quit. Mu manager asked me to automate whatever i can so I automated all the reporting and the metrics with just macros, VBA and a python script on a desktop to run the files and email to my manager. Most of that was just from chatGPT. I also made some tableau dashboards for monitoring. When I showed my manager this it quadrupled my workload and got his assistant laid off. I feel terrible and learned to not tell people what excel is actually capable of.
It is crazy to me how little time people put into these things before assuming it can't be done. They think I'm a computer genius and I told my boss a million times I can't actually code but it's in one ear out the other
I worked myself out of my first job this way.
My first job out of college was to help a managing director organize her letters of credit. She hand calculated everything and faxed out monthly letters to clients to inform them of required bank wire transfers (interest and principal payments).
That was supposed to be my full-time job. I spent 3 days to automate it all with spreadsheets and mailmerge, including spending one night sleeping under my desk to get it done. That whole process took about 45 hours. Spent the next month to trial it out (without telling my boss) to make sure everything worked.
Unveiled it only to her because I wouldn’t want to reveal to other staff that her job was a joke. Somehow the head of the firm and a board member found out and I got promoted immediately with a 30% raise and new responsibilities and a new boss.
Make others look good and the world is your oyster.
P.S. It took me so long (45hrs) only because I had to learn trade finance and was not a spreadsheet expert and had to experiment. This was before you could google shit so you had to play around with it and find out the hard way that the idiotic formula you spend 3 hours constructing was available as a canned formula already. If I had to do this project today, it would probably take me about 30 minutes but only because I’d have to refresh myself on the mailmerge stuff.
I long ago figured out that most accounting software does not prepare financial reports in the way that management wants to see them. So I began figuring out how to download the accounting system's reports, import them into Excel, and, using VBA and formulae only occasionally more complex than VLOOKUP (which is still foreign to many, if not most), develop reports that presented the data in a way that management wanted them. I don't consider myself a guru -- I rely on Google to find out the way other people have addressed the problems I encounter, and don't bank the knowledge -- but I've never come close to meeting anyone in any organization I've ever been in who's as good at Excel as I am.
I kind of have the opposite thing going on. Lots of people like to do really complex formulas and I'm a noob so I just use a ton of helper columns that I hide and SUMIFS plus INDEX MATCH are the only formulas that I really need.
When I started I knew basic stuff in Excel like COUNTIF, and some other easier functions. That also blew my managers and supervisors away. Eventually the worksheets I started working on were a little more complex coming from corporate but because I understood what they were doing suddenly I was the excel guy. Since then I've gone on to build full blown dashboards for departments, automated worksheets that pulls data directly from our servers for on the spot analysis. I've been lately getting into Power BI and have now talked the company into purchasing me a pro licence to use for the enterprise. So I'm just going to keep expanding my skill set
I used - and Today() to make things turn red or yellow (permits) if they were going to expire in a week/month. All of a sudden I'm in Mensa.
Another trick was Subtract today's date from an arbitrary date in the past to make a number that changes every day. This gave a document a unique serial number that increased by 1 every day for a shipping document. It also filled in all the weights, names, properties and hazzards of the items. All the driver had to do was type how many. Then it populated a second sheet with all that info. Voila! 2 shipping documents! One for the office. One for the driver. Everybody legal.
For the past 2 companies, all of them treated me like an excel god, even the other dept called me to ask for explanation. Back then my nested ifs go up to 50 ifs 🤦🏼
Yep, this is why I’m confident AI won’t take away our jobs for the time-being. These people don’t even know how to google, I doubt they’ll be able to use copilot, understand the response, and implement it into their own workbooks.
Became the "excel guy" by taking a 4 hour manual process and automating it to 20 mins with VBA. Nearly automated myself out of that job. So now I'm a bit more discreet and turn in requested reports "just-in-time"
Half the people you meet are stupider than you think they are. (Me)
Most are like me just wandering around hoping to not have to deal with a whole lot of junk.
I take pride in automating things. Its all been self-taught because that’s how my whole career with computers has been. I’ve only rarely been around people who know more than me.
Shortly after taking a new job I took a sheet with a massive amount of data and summarized it in a really simple pivot table to get some numbers that someone was looking for. Took me about 10 minutes what apparently was taking several days for the last person to do. I was quite the star there after that LOL
Spending 15 minutes to learn how to use excel properly with youtube is underrated. You can smoke people in almost any workplace with very basic excel knowledge.
I got myself into a six figure analytics job just by getting halfway decent at excel formulas, copying and pasting vba, and now power bi. My whole dept thinks I'm some hacker wizard.
I'm a mechanic lol
Always done this, it's purely because I'm lazy and hate doing manual repetitive tasks so I pretty much automated my last job. One sales data sheet used to take the previous guy 6 days to produce, by the time I left I had it down to under 3 hours.
I told nobody that I'd changed any processes and just worked on my own side hustles to while away the hours.
This is so real. Everyone at work treats me like I'm IT because I know basic commands, formulas, and conditional formatting. If they think that's impressive, I'm just going to let them.
Same for me. I have a spreadsheet sheet that summarizes many columns of data using COUNTIF, SUMIF, etc and everyone thinks I’m an Excel wizard.
It’s hilarious because my knowledge doesn’t extend beyond IF formulas, VLOOKUP, and utilizing cell tags and whatnot, but I guess that’s far more than the average person in an office 🤷♂️
Now youve done it, now youre their excel guy 😐 for every time a formula deletes itself mysteriously
Blow their mind with 'Format Painter' and you'll get a raise
I started a new job in an admin role for a large company. A particular project came in and knowing a bit of excel I created a database with some complex IF loop formulas, blew everyone away and I was soon promoted. Then watched a few YouTube videos on dashboards and VB scripting, made a couple of fancy dashboards with macros and custom slicers, etc, and got promoted again. I'm now head analyst and have tripled my starting salary within 2 years of employment. Excel is awesome :)
yeah, I have had a colleague at work who - technically - was educated in Excel, even had training on Pivot-tables. And they then were utterly befuddled when I was cranking out a few COUNTIFs and some other basic functions. I became the go-to-guy there, too.
-
Just a small advice: If you are the excel guy now, good for you! But don't over-emphasize it. Don't rush through your tasks only because you can, because you might create absurd expectations towards yourself. Make sure that people are not taking advantage of you and your skills and that they are not shoving the work they would rather not do onto you, only because you are one of the few people there who can actually do them competently! ;)
Is it possible to learn this power? Or is this not from a Jedi type things?
I’m debating whether to learn Salesforce better or Excel better when I take a year off from work.
I work in SaaS.
Like how good could i get at Excel in a year? Or better to spend 30 mins a day on Excel, 30 mins on Salesforce.
Bro, a year? You'll learn fucking tons. As, for courses etc, I learned more in two weeks by just being given a task with a spreadsheet than I ever would have by doing a course for a year. I'm not even joking. I would go with excel, and just find a problem that needs solving and just dive in. I knew a little formula stuff when I started but not much. Just had to Google and GPT through it until stuff worked. But once I'd understood how to string a formula together, I didn't just copy paste it for the next one. I'd write it out each time to get comfortable with how it was constructed. It's just all about practice, and actually doing, rather than being stuck in tutorial hell.
Worked at a small logistics firm, one accountant who was a good looking airhead who was definitely sleeping with the owner. She asked me how I would do a spreadsheet once. I used conditional formatting to make negative numbers red and positive numbers green. Completely blew her mind. She was our only accountant.
I initially started knowing nothing of VBA. My supervisor got roped into a hell of a task that he used VBA to automate, and once he left it was given to me (I was team lead at the time) and it had become an integral business process, so I 'had' to learn it. So I did.
Within a few months I had gained enough knowledge (vlookup, index/match, pivot tables and basic vba loops) to automate a lot of processes, make reports that exceeded what 'official reports' provided and became 'the process guy'
I was well underpaid at that point, so I found a new position doing my old trade of Phone Tech Support, but for the first year I found all their excel/reporting and modified/changes processes, and within that year got on their SQL database team (knowing nothing of SQL, so that whole loop started anew) and increased my pay by about 50% within two years.
As much as I say 'I know nothing of excel', those few things truly make mountains, so use it well :) I wish you well on your journey!
I swear!... I think Excel courses are 1,000% worth their weight in gold. Just a WHATIF, and a few VLOOKUPs and you look like a freaking wizard to the slack jawed gumps of the office world.
Learn Excel, be a hero.
I made that mistake a few years ago at my last job. I showed my manager a new schedule that I put together that randomizes who is paired with who for the day. That was the day I became the excel guy for all departments for no additional pay with the added bonus of still performing my original duties.
I'm the Excel guy at work
I barely know how to work it.
Currently I'm using sumproduct function to deduct stock when production occurs. And I'm a genius. My boss and coworkers are thoroughly impressed by the system.
I started as The Excel Girl,
then I became The Python Girl,
then I became The Cloud Girl.
Now I'm a Site Reliability Engineer despite having no IT background 🤷 I haven't a clue what I'm doing but I'll figure it out over the next year or so.
This was me when I started my new job. I had only a basic understanding of Excel, but I used ChatGPT heavily to write formulas to make it do what I want, and now apparently, I'm now an Excel whiz... I've even tried showing others in the office how to leverage AI, but they just don't care.. these are the dinosaurs I work with. Most are not even that old either 🙈
Some people just don't like change. These are going to be left behind soon, and honestly, the quicker the better I say.
I took over a process from a colleague. There was an export from payroll system that provided data for a report the client requested. It was done every month and she manually copy-pasted every single value.
No way was I going to spend 30-45 minutes every month manually copy-pasting cells, it is boring, useless and leaves too much room for error. I spend 10 minutes setting up the formulas and since then it took a minute to complete, plus 1 minute to cross chceck, if it was ok.
Since then I have been the Excel person to go to for questions and moved from payroll to reporting, because I wanted to play with Excel most of the time and be paid for it :-D
I'm a consultant with a focus on everything related to data and analytics.
I sometimes question my sanity when I see how customers use (or rather don't use) Excel. I recently got a dashboard in Excel. Not one of the kpis were calculated but rather all of them enteren manually. The underlying data was on the 2nd sheet.
Don't even get me started with the complete lack of any thought through IT infrastructure or data pipelines.
I’m not an excel expert like some masterminds but have definitely used simple formulas before and have blown away some people.
Who knows what some people out there were doing???
I am the “spreadsheet genius” at work too and it’s so silly because literally all I’m doing is basic formulas, and sometimes more complex ones but I just google a solution then trial and error it until I get it working. A recruiter just used my salary-pay formula worksheet in an HR meeting (working hours times pay rate time number of paid days in the year, all divided by 12 pay periods—we aren’t talking anything crazy here) and my coworkers call me if their “import range” spreadsheet stops working. It’s kind of fun to feel like a god but I’m certainly only barely scratching the surface of the capabilities of excel/Google sheets.
Similar to your story. Found COUNTIFS during the pandemic when I used it to track quarantined employees coming and going.
Very few people have desire to want to learn Excel to help them other than recording numbers. I see some still manually counting thing, or even putting number values and text in the same cells of a column. Drives me crazy. My favorite is when this use it for lists (text) instead of Word.
You should get into learning and using Power Query Editor to fetch your data automatically for you if available. It’s powerful.
That's awesome! COUNTIF and COUNTIFS are powerful tools, and it's great that you're getting recognition for using them effectively.
It's a familiar story – sometimes, simple Excel functions can make a big impact. Embrace your newfound Excel guru status and keep on impressing!
Same here. I don’t even know VBA but I know how to use ChatGPT to generate the code to automate tasks (even if the code is less than perfect). I work in manufacturing and my job used to be super redundant and required hours of matching finished inventory to upcoming customer orders. This had to be done everyday and used to take at least half a day to do. After some ChatGPT VBA code, it now takes 15 minutes. I just dump the data from SAP into the excel file, press a button and immediately I see which orders are completed and which ones I still need to plan. I have so much spare time now that I’ve been able to take on additional tasks and not feel so rushed all the time. Gaining the sense of control over your job is liberating and any task that you find yourself repeating regularly should be automated as much as possible.
I’ve shown a couple of coworkers this and no one seems to realize just how efficient it is but when they run into excel problems, I am always the first one they reach out to.
Being the go to person for excel will quickly make you the spreadsheet technician for the entire office. Speaking from experience, unless your career aspirations are to automate everyone else’s work, set boundaries, or find a new job
It’s a metaphor for people that “apply themselves” and the people that don’t. Every “excel guy/gal” was created by solving a problem. Excel will always be integral to business no matter how much people shit on it. I took several, manual routines, copy paste re-run calcs, copy results paste elsewhere ad nauseam - and automated them with VBA. Shrunk a 1 hour long process down to 1 min. It requires the mentality “I’m going to put myself through the wringer and spend many hours on this, so that no one has to do this ever again”. It eventually morphs from “excel guy/gal” to “process guy/gal” and from there it’s wherever you want it to go if you keep applying that mindset.
Yep, every place I've worked there's been some ridiculous manual bullshit that people do just because "that's how we've always done it." In my last job, they were printing out copies of account balances each day and manually checking them against the previous days to detect any changes. After doing it literally the first day, I thought fuck this, there is DEFINITELY a quicker way of doing this. Ended up fixing it so that excel would just automatically highlight any cell that had changed from the previous day, saving probably close to an hour a day. When I showed my colleague, she basically just didn't care. When I went off on leave for a week, she resorted to doing it manually again. People infuriate me lmao.
Something similar happened to me. Coworkers mocked me for “fancy pivot” use, after I automated tasks that we spent hours on, every single day. I’m barely even intermediate.
Crazy huh? It's like they actually can't fathom someone coming in and saving them time and effort. They'd rather just do what they know.
To be fair, there are strong arguments for doing it their way: 1. You get asked to do fewer tasks when everything takes longer. Expectations matter. 2. You're not paid extra for finding a more efficient process, and likely won't be promoted either. 3. Since people don't know what Excel can do, the attitude of finding efficiencies can backfire. You're bound to run into something that can't be made more efficient in Excel, and need a much more powerful tool, like a database or actual stats software. Those cost money, and when you try to explain why Excel and their current framework can't handle that, you won't be believed and are just holding your true knowledge hostage. If you're going to be on this path anyway, IME the best way to go about it is make a fraction of stuff more efficient and use that to get a better job elsewhere. Rinse and repeat.
Just do it secretly, spend a minute triggering the macro, spend 59 browsing Reddit
If management treats you badly or always fails to recognise and reward your achievements...then this is the answer. Especially in this new working from home world. Source: I manage people. I used to be managed.
There's nothing wrong with spending those 59 minutes learning new skills and finding new job opportunities, either.
And wait until there's an error just once in your excel. You get a shitload even if generally the error rate has dropped to 1 % compared to manual process.
Usually the “error” is where someone replaced my formula with data. They “helped” by updating my worksheet for me. 🙄
For some, the job is looking busy, not getting stuff done
Edit Meant to reply above you.
I am excel guy. I do not share my secrets. This means I have more time in my day for more work from the boss if I do
I've explained to people exactly what I did and why only to explain it again and again, even basic things like keyboard shortcuts. I can't see them ever knowing how more advanced formulas work or that you can pull data from one sheet into another. Recently one of them started editing an Excel file that was working perfectly fine and ruined it so I ended having to go in early before my shift to fix it, took me 2 hours to get it right. I've told my boss that we waste so much time doing things that could be automated and if I had access to the database I could easily do it, instead we have to enter data from the database into excel files.
OMG, just give me read only access. I am not going to delete your precious tables FFS!.
I take the other approach. I take the time to show people who are interested how to put the formula together. Then I'm not bothered all the time with simple excel requests
because effort isn't always rewarded, instead people get fired and let go and given more work without any pay raises it's different when you are paid well and when you are bottom of the barrel do it but don't tell anyone if it doesn't pay
Yeah, you are blowing up their spot. They want to do fake work for hours instead of have to do hard stuff or be replaced by automation
I started a new job and my predecessor was generating attendance sheet for 40+ classes per week, by "hand". As soon as she showed me how to do it I was like: "Alright, when you're coming back from mat leave it's not gonna be like that anymore." What an amazing waste of time it was holy shit. Fixed that within two weeks with VBA and this sub's help. Now I'm the excel guy.
Man, it is bonkers. In this day and age for people to be printing stuff and manually comparing it etc. And when the automated solutions are literally a Google search away...
That's the problem, they don't even know enough to search the problem correctly, or if its a solution that needs a little bit of tweaking it's beyond them It sounds snobby but I honestly think it's an intelligence issue. Some people have no idea how to improvise or solve any kinds of problems
It’s a mindset thing. Some people have the mentality of “here’s a problem I don’t know the answers to, but I’ll find a way to solve it” others just think “fuck that” and carry on with the way they’ve been shown, regardless of how inefficient or stupid it is.
I’m the “Excel guy” at my office. People want to know how I know so much. I tell them Google is your friend. The trick is knowing how to ask the question to find the answer. Some people don’t know how to ask the question.
I think some people don't want to speed up their work because they are comfortable with what they currently do and are afraid that if their 40 hrs of work only takes 5 hrs they will be out of a job.
We just did a massive QoE audit at work and, not joking, I couldn’t get a colleague to use the sum copy function. They were screaming about how it would take weeks. I mean, it was mind numbing but only took me about 16 hours to do 100% of AR and client data, plus about 80% of AP.
Major epiphany here Hawk. What if the reason nobody sends excel is because they aren’t excel people, instead of a nefarious plot. You’re giving me ideas on a uniform request template. I’ve been asking the ai for ideas. Thank you for the spark. Sincerely.
I experienced this 2 jobs ago. When I first started, my "supervisor" was doing this task that would take him several hours each week and I was like fuck that. I spent a few days cooking and came up with a better way to do the task and made it even more accurate. I showed it to him and he was like "let's do it my way". I then knew the type of person I was working it so I stopped pitching ideas to him and found opportunities to work with others instead. Fast forward to a year later we got some changes in management and we both reported to the same boss. The boss recognized my skills right away and put them in good used. At one point, I got to work with the clients director of administration and implemented ways to revamp their data management system. I believe i was at my creative peak then. I ended up stuck doing what would take 3 people to do manually. When I asked for a raise/promotion, they refused and only gave me a small bonus so I left (my boss definitely vouched for my raise but politics got in the way). So yeah, being the excel guy can get you places, or you can also get stuck doing something forever because you're the only who knows how to do it. Make sure you get compensated appropriately! Edit: some grammar here and there.
> When I asked for a raise/promotion, they refused and only gave me a small bonus I am dealing with this exact same situation right now. I've literally done things no one else in the business can do, asked for raise, they've taken 12 weeks to even get back to me and I believe I'm not going to get what I asked for. The business is massively better off thanks to me and now I almost wish I never bothered.
That sucks. Are you maintaining/running the tools you created? Is that something that can be done without you being there? Say if you took a week or two off, would people miss you? The stuff I created was so complicated (not by choice, I just make things up as I go and I'm definitely not the best at it.. but it works!) that I was the only that knew how to run lol - bad practice i know but it wasn't my problem.
You can put it on your resumé. Build up your skills in their time and increase your value to a potential employer.
I am not an excel guy but I am a problem solver and am always looking for efficiency in everyday tasks. I think some people just get offended or feel insulted that this way, the only way they have done this task they hate and sank so much time into could have been avoided by simply using a tool or method they weren’t aware of. Initial reactions are anger or frustration and they double down on their way because they have to prove to themselves they were right all along. Or maybe they are just too set in their ways. Either or. Finding someone who is accepting of change right away is rare in my experience.
I think they are afraid, if a simpler way to do their job appears, then they will be asked to do more tasks. If suddenly that way bottle necks or something, they will still have to do the extra work. People like being comfortable. If they are great at how it was done, then they dont want to try something new just to do it. Also they do have a reasonable fear of possibly being replaced by an excel sheet as well.
How did you automate to highlight cells that had changed, can you explain to a basic excel user who is now expected to do magic at work.
It was a few years ago but I think it was literally just conditional formatting between the two sheets. Without jumping on my pc and actually trying it I'm not sure, but if you googled it or asked chatGPT I'm sure you'd get a decent answer.
[MATCH](https://www.ablebits.com/office-addins-blog/excel-compare-two-columns-matches-differences/) is your friend.
MATCHINDEX, with a sprinkling of dropdown lists, is fully half of my magic. Today I discovered XMATCH (in reverse search) for finding the first period a person was not paid, to reverse engineer their starting week.
You can do that using VBA - CHATGPT will give you the code with the right prompts. I have a script that colors cells red that are lower than last save and green for those that have increased. I can give more info if you’re interested.
This has been my experience for 40 years of working with people, spreadsheets, and systems :(
I think I have experienced the mother of this stuff. I was doing contracting for the federal government putting together an analytics and reporting system. There was a ton of low hanging fruit. The one that blew me away was a woman who's entire job was printing out a green bar report, burst it into the appropriate sections and place the sections into the mailbox of the various department heads. We developed a report that ran and sent the appropriate report to each department head's email box. They also had the option to run the report on demand. We felt pretty good about his particular part of the solution. Hell, we even duplicated the green bar appearance. Now came my real government contracting education. This woman went to her boss and complained that what we delivered didn't do what she needed. She wanted the new system to print out the old green bar report so she could burst and distribute it. Suffice it to say, that after a long and tense meeting, we recreated her green bar report. The hardest part was getting the reporting system to talk to a dinosaur printer. She was happy and the world started rotating again. I found out later that she retired in two years and that report was her sole responsibility.
Accountant here. Everything you said above is how you progress in your career. Now you need to move into an industry where someone can see the good work that you're doing and getting paid for it.
I remember a co-worker logging in folders using a hand laser scanner. For some reason the entry for the cells would move to the right instead of down after scanning a folder. So after every folder she would have to set the scanner down, use the down and left arrow, then scan the next folder. I changed a setting and she could scan an entire box in just a couple minutes. I think she actually got pissed at me because I turned 8 hours worth of work into less than an hour and she was going to have to find some other work to fill the rest of her day.
I learned to keep my Excel to myself. People don't appreciate or understand any innovations you bring to them and doing working conspicuously efficiently just gets you more work.
What sucks is when you tell your boss and they argue with you and threaten to fire you for questioning their authoritah.
>eventually morphs from “excel guy/gal” to “process guy/gal” If often doesn't. Or rather they never grow out of Excel. Excel is incredibly powerful, but this also makes it very dangerous for many companies. More often than not I see "Excel people" that never knew when to stop using Excel and eventually companies have mission critical shit running on a workbook made 10 years ago and the creator is long gone. God forbid something happen to that. I'm actually working on a blog post right now where the gist of it is "is your Excel person endangering your company?" There's nothing wrong with being the "Excel person"--hell, that's kinda how I started--but unless you evolve into the "data person" by learning the practical limits of Excel and new tools like Fabric, Python, Airflow, SQL, or whatever, you might be putting your company at risk with poor continuity planning. If you get hit by a bus, or MSFT pushes some update that breaks a legacy formula you were using, or whatever, your company might be forced to hire a consulting firm like ours to clean it up. I like what I do, but I don't want to see clients in distress. It's much easier for me to do a transformation rather than a cleanup. I love Excel and use it every day, but there are some things it can do that you should think twice before making it do. Just this week I got a report from a client's "BI team" that was a workbook with something like nine hidden sheets with a bunch of helper columns, a good amount of VBA, and an instruction page that used 2,000 rows of text and screen shots to show how to copy and paste the source data from two phone systems into Excel to light up the report. Recreating this in Fabric would be an afternoon's worth of work and it would be completely automated. This isn't a small company, either. This is a \~$5B organization. Insane.
My manager at a F250 company spends about half his working hours pulling reports and copy totals into his tracking sheet. I have all the same reports and made a dashboard using power query that added new data daily using Power Automate. Guess who lost access to Power Automate and got told "that's not what we pay you to do"? All you had to do was hit the "refresh" button and the rest was automatic. I spent 4 hours on a Saturday doing it. We also hired a global data manager for my department who is a self proclaimed excel guy. He doesn't know other programs/tools yet. I showed him how to make a table and use Filters last month.
F As shitty as it sounds, many of my engagements are with companies that employ people like you and for some reason they'd rather hear the same answer from consultants that they've been hearing from their employees for years. It's fucking stupid and I feel for you, but I always love those engagements because I get to work with progressive-minded people like yourself and do next to nothing. I never pass off employee work as my own since the data thing is only half my job. The other half is operationalizing the data. So, it feels good to assure an exec they have a good data team and then I use their material to change ops.
>they’d rather hear the same answer from consultants that they’ve been hearing from their employees for years Sounds like all consulting gigs. Why would my employee know if I never trained them to know? This consultant is expensive, so they must know
My jaw opened reading this. Didn’t know how to make a table???? LOL. No knock on anyone who doesn’t know, but if you proclaim to be an excel guy, there’s no way you skipped table. Edit: excellent to excel.
And filters? That is Excel 101. How can anyone say they are an Excel person and not know this?
I get that completely. It's knowing the difference in needing a spreadsheet or a database. The work I do literally doesn't warrant anything more than the odd spreadsheet at a time. It's normally for a fixed amount of data that is never going to increase or become more complicated than pulling a few figures here and there. But I do totally get you and agree.
Yeah, that's a great usecase and you are fine doing that. Just watch out for the feature creep because one day you may wake up and realize you just built a full ERP in Excel lol. I use it for prototyping and ad hoc bullshit. But if I know a process isn't a one off and will become a regular occurrence, I'll try pushing stakeholders toward a more scalable solution even if it requires a bit more effort on the frontend. It's worth it in the long run.
This is my fear honestly so any advice you have, please give it. I’ve become the excel person at my job but my powers have been seen and now I’m becoming the data person with very little experience. I’ve learned SQL and we use a software with consultants who have built the databases for us. But there’s a lot of data I need to maintain that won’t be going into those SQL databases. I’d consider myself very advanced at excel and I’m an engineer by schooling so I’m smart, I just don’t know where to begin.
Honestly just start small. When I was making a simple dashboard to pull certain data, I started off by just wanting one figure. Then my manager asked can we break it down into X and Y info. So I added another couple of formulas to pull that info. Then it gradually just became more in depth from there. Google and chatGPT are very helpful. ChatGPT isn't always correct, but you can be as specific as possible and it at least knows what you're trying to accomplish, which has saved me so much time opening loads of stack overflow threads that don't answer my question. Just do it one step at a time. I'm sure you've got this.
Without knowing anything about your environment this will be high-level, but if you can get your data into SQL and it makes sense in SQL, do it. Look into some kind of ingestion routine that takes the files and puts them into tables. Python, Power Automate, Fabric, whatever you have access to. If you can't do that, SharePoint makes for a pretty good ghetto datalake. From there use Power Query to connect to your data and load only what you need in Excel. Also, download Power BI and play with it. It also uses Power Query although there are some slight variations between the implementation in Excel and Power BI (and Fabric dataflows, FWIW). ChatGPT-4--specifically Analyst GPT which is a custom GPT made by someone over on r/powerbi --works really well as long as you are good with your prompts. It will also help you with SQL and Python. If you do go the Power BI route, keep in mind there are things that are easy in Excel but challenging in Power BI and vice versa. Getting used to not having cells is usually the hardest thing for people moving from spreadsheets to a BI tool.
Singapore airlines ran their frequent flyer redemptions from an Excel for years and years. It was nuts.
I try to tell everybody in my department if you’re working with the Microsoft Office platform and you need a solution where the process involves doing something repetitively over and over again VBA will do it in a fraction of the time. They never believe me. I spend a couple hours designing an algorithm to do whatever they want, give it to them and something that takes three or four hours to process now become something that takes two minutes to process. Minds are always completely blown.
This could so be me. I had to write a daily email detailing the previous day's numbers. "Keep it sounding interesting, and not flat" was the ask. So a few random word choices attached to however far apart the percentage values are with a great deal of concat work and my 1-hour chore is done in 5 minutes to import the raw data. Five years later, everyone still assumes I write things like "Yesterday's numbers in GLP were nearly 12% higher than forecast, due to significantly lower AHT times from the four reporting teams." The thing that frustrates me? I can literally spend days putting together some incredible mathematical modeling that interactively can do things in minutes that took a team of 3 almost a week to put together... and they think that the conditional formatting that changes depending what time you put in cell B1 is the best thing ever.
This is exactly how I tackle things. I spend hours trying to get formulas and sheets to link together so that going forward my reporting takes 5 minutes. I need to learn VBA. Have no idea what it is or how to use it.
For anyone that thinks this sounds like you, remember it next time you're interviewing for a job. This is an incredible way to turn just another skill listed at the bottom of your resume into the perfect response to the typical "tell me about yourself" or "what's your biggest strength." edit: typos
God damn well said. The idea of turning solving an arduous task with Excel into being process oriented is a reallllly great spin for interviews, and moreover great way to approach your job
I became the Excel guy for my department about seven years ago, and then learned VBA and was able to make entire program programs to help my department , realized I love programming and now I know syntax for VBA, SQL, Python 3, c++, Java power bi, HTML5, CSS3 I have certification and relational database management. Because of Excel explicitly VBA I am in the process of becoming a full stack developer. It’s a slippery slope. 😂
VBA is a path to many powers some might consider… marketable.
VBA is an awesome language to learn because it gives you a platform to work off of instead of having to create the platform yourself. it’s a very marketable knowledge set and there’s many things I can do simply because I know VBA. Smaller companies are not looking for IT executives. They’re looking for individuals that can do awesome things with limited resources because they don’t have tons of money and the Microsoft office platform offers that.
Exactly. “Professional” data analyst people turn their noses up at Excel. Treating it like the Fisher Price My First DataSet tool. You know what everyone has though? Microsoft Excel. It’s guaranteed availability and compatibility.
This gonna be me
IFERROR has basically made me a god.
NO #REF SHALL PASS!
https://preview.redd.it/0z5ob8xhpywc1.jpeg?width=1170&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=badd6864adf3b32468a33d074c22676cce94505c The fucking audacity
N/A? Oh dear formula, I think you meant "".
ChatGPT has made me one. I can ask it to make excel do anything I want and it will spit out formulas. Honestly I don’t even need this sub anymore.
Bruh
lol. I hate to say it because I respect the people in this sub a lot, but it’s almost unnecessary now.
Be-careful, LLM's make mistakes. You still need to know the basics and review what they give you. [New York lawyers sanctioned for using fake ChatGPT cases in legal brief](https://www.reuters.com/legal/new-york-lawyers-sanctioned-using-fake-chatgpt-cases-legal-brief-2023-06-22/)
I used to be the "Excel guru" in an old job back before I knew how to do half the things I know now. What is the phrase, "in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king"?
Index/Match made me the king. It’s nice.
May I present to you: new nee and shiny XLOOKUP
Ah, but that would require your work has something newer than Excel 2016
Everyone claims they know how to use Excel, but what they really mean is they know how to open Excel and type something in a cell, maybe change the colour and/or size of the text. 99% of people can’t do anything more interesting than a SUM.
This is so true. I used Alt + = to perform addition and trust me, all were baffled. Folks literally used a calculator to see whether the output was accurate or not.
looked a someones script, broke it down, re-created it from scratch, i now learned how to create custom buttons to plus minus, while adding numbers into a square, so simply put, its a basket ball score sheet with buttons added foul button 1 point foul shots, 2 pointer and 3 pointer if miss clicked, a minus to remove score if did not count =) added home team and away team to look like a score board https://preview.redd.it/zj8cxq1zovwc1.png?width=1702&format=png&auto=webp&s=f6372bcc19c05ce23dcfb7ef63f23b12b475b8dc
Turn off the grid lines!!!
dang it BOSS! fine, I'll comply added some points for flavor https://preview.redd.it/ipnp17p5dwwc1.png?width=1762&format=png&auto=webp&s=cb654967e590970c1dca460ffdae2a24516d470c
Cool
People say they "know how to use Excel" in the same way they know how to drive a car. They can interface with it and do basic tasks like driving from A to B, but they don't understand how it works, how to diagnose/fix problems, or how to customize it to fit a particular need while ensuring it runs reliably. The most they ever look under the hood is when they check the oil to confirm it looks the way they're used to it looking.
My boss and I use each other as rubber duckies on a somewhat daily basis. Especially when I'm trying to make sure shit like the following work correctly. =IF(IFERROR(INDIRECT(CONCAT(VLOOKUP(IF(YEAR(TODAY())=$A$5,MONTH(TODAY()),12),MonthCode,2),"[TS_YTD]")),INDIRECT(CONCAT(VLOOKUP(IF(YEAR(TODAY())=$A$5,MONTH(TODAY())-1,12),MonthCode,2),"[TS_YTD]")))=0,"",IFERROR(INDIRECT(CONCAT(VLOOKUP(IF(YEAR(TODAY())=$A$5,MONTH(TODAY()),12),MonthCode,2),"[TS_YTD]")),INDIRECT(CONCAT(VLOOKUP(IF(YEAR(TODAY())=$A$5,MONTH(TODAY())-1,12),MonthCode,2),"[TS_YTD]")))) Was trying to remember where my longest nested formula I've ever made resides but I'm pretty sure this isn't it.
That looks impressive, but man if you’re doing stuff like this I suggest you start working with SQL and/or Python instead. This is begging for errors.
Sunken cost from people that came before me that I had to iterate on. This has been phased out as we've moved entirely to an actual Oracle SQL database.
Sure, here's a condensed version of the Excel formula: ```excel =IF( IFERROR( INDIRECT(CONCAT(VLOOKUP(IF(YEAR(TODAY())=$A$5,MONTH(TODAY()),12), MonthCode, 2), "[TS_YTD]")), INDIRECT(CONCAT(VLOOKUP(IF(YEAR(TODAY())=$A$5,MONTH(TODAY())-1,12), MonthCode, 2), "[TS_YTD]")) ) = 0, "", IFERROR( INDIRECT(CONCAT(VLOOKUP(IF(YEAR(TODAY())=$A$5,MONTH(TODAY()),12), MonthCode, 2), "[TS_YTD]")), INDIRECT(CONCAT(VLOOKUP(IF(YEAR(TODAY())=$A$5,MONTH(TODAY())-1,12), MonthCode, 2), "[TS_YTD]")) ) ) ``` This condensed version maintains the structure and logic of the original formula while making it easier to read and understand.
I'm like 90% sure you can remove 50% of this formula and it'll work exactly the same lmao
All I know is VLOOKUP
Learn XLOOKUP and you will immediately learn that even VLOOKUP is unnecessarily complicated
Sir, are you trying to tell me you know VLOOKUP but not SUM, AVG, MIN, MAX, etc.?
Does autosum COUNT?
No, it sums.
Hold my pivot table... 😂
Once you implement an INDEX MATCH they look at you as the messiah
I raise your index match with a SUMIFS / INDEXMATCH / INDIRECT combination to make the sheet reference variable 🤓
Indirect is niche but clutch. I don’t need it often but when I do, boy howdy. I also learned that you can reference tab names and then have that get inserted into indirect functions, which was a godsend when I needed to build 100 identical worksheets to break down named subgroups of my data (think group 1, group 2, etc). I could just copy the tab and rename it and build the whole workbook super fast.
Index match is dead. No need for it anymore.
Yeah, but old habits die hard. It still works fine for me the odd allocation I use it.
Checkout xlookup, index match's replacement.
XLOOKUP is the best shit ever. I do IT training and when I teach XLOOKUP I feel like a wizard
Fuck INDEXMATCH. XLOOKUP is the new hotness.
I got mad at a dumb manual process and made a tool for the fortune 50 company I work at and people shit their pants. I just rolled it out to the national network. I googled the whole thing into existence. I feel like the dog doing science meme
This is me. Literally just Google a lot until it works, or chatGPT some very specific examples. But I've got to say, it's worked. Made me more confident with formulas and the more I practice the easier it gets.
Yeah it’s awesome to be able to use time to figure it out in a practical application and have people be stoked about it. I get to develop my skills and help people get out of arduous tasks. It’s a win win situation
Use conditional formatting next, it'll blow their minds! I'm the go-to person for spreadsheets or any IT questions. Except printers, those buggers hate me, and I hate them. I like to make spreadsheets as automated as possible with pretty colours. I was once dubbed "the spreadsheet queen," and now it's a running joke. ETA: I'm self taught, don't really use VBA and tend to forget how to do things of not used for a while, but I'm good at solving problems and figuring out useful formulas for solutions.
Love conditional formatting. It was one of the first things I looked up when trying to do some stuff on a spreadsheet a few years ago. Mainly simple stuff like if any cells in a certain column contain "Yes", then fill the row in green sort of shit.
It's my cheat to visualize a schedule of operations. You can plug the start and conplete date and it'll draw a beautiful line on the calendar, then highlight today's column.
You can also use conditional formatting to torment people. If the text equals a name turn the text white and make it dissappear. Or replace it with different spelling. Maybe change a key formula or tilt the title bar 2 degrees. Shrink all the text. There are still sheets out there I have made that refuse to work for anyone named "Mike" 🙃
My hatred for printers is infinite. There's nothing worse than becoming the IT go-to and being asked about printers.
I fixed the conditional formatting on the office workstation booking spreadsheet to warn people of double booking and I added a grey-out shading that automatically helps guide your eyes towards today's date (because I was tired of searching, lol) And I made paid day off holidays show up automatically with yellow highlights. Next, I need to come up with a non-macro automated button to refresh the conditional formatting rules after people mess it up by copy-pasting the wrong way.
I had the complete opposite. Thought I had versatile knowledge before starting at my current job - oh wow how wrong I was. Learned that XLOOKUP was a company norm instead of VLOOKUP, INDEX MATCH used consequetively in very long formulas in every file, HSTACK and VSTACK were almost considered basic even though I’d never even heard of those functions, and Query/VBA was always the way to go when things got too complicated. Safe to say I’ve learned 10x more than I ever learned from my previous 2 jobs and 6 years of studying. Great to have smart people around you.
Wow what type of company is this? Or which field?
Energy company!
I've not used XLOOKUP before but it looks so much more powerful than VLOOKUP, I'm going to make sure to remember it next time I need it!
I once showed an older colleague that he can use VLOOKUP instead of manually looking up a value in one table, memorising it, clicking open another table and typing that value into a cell (rinse and repeat x 1000). So because I bothered to Google the issue once and watched a 10 minute YouTube tutorial to learn VLOOKUP, I am now the excel warlock who just may have to burn at the stake for all my dangerous excel witchcraft.
Did he ever learn that he can copy and then paste the value instead of having to memorize and then type the value out?
I'm gonna go with no.
He did, but that copied also formatting from the source table and "made the target table look messy", so his way was clearly superior. I did try to show him how to only paste values, but that involved something other than right clicking and then clicking the part he is used to clicking, which again is pure sorcery and herecy. And God forbid using filthy keyboard shortcuts!
I once worked at a government agency where the “computer gal” spent three or four days every week manually coloring Excel rows in a large spreadsheet based on a numeric value in one of the columns. I showed her the simple conditional formatting formula that accomplished this process in seconds. She continued to do it the manual way.
Of course she did.
You showed her that her job could be eliminated.
I built a dynamic roster using xlookup and my manager sent the news all the way to the district VP
Oh man, I make worksheets that are a bit more convoluted but nowhere near the level of expertise as some of these people on here. I consider it a modest understanding of Excel formulas. But wow, it's like I'm speaking a foreign language to these folks. So yeah, job security, I guess. Nobody else knows how to use COUNTIF or XLOOKUP, much less stuff like WORKDAYS and INDEX/MATCH. I would never be able to explain SUMPRODUCT to them (though honestly I have an Achilles Heel with it that I simply cannot put into words). I don't even tap into VBA that much, which is a testament to how robust Excel is.
I made the mistake of letting the calculated mediocrity I've maintained for years slip a couple weeks ago, now I'm the computer guy soon-to-be-promoted to programmer for factory lines worth millions......I don't know how to write code and have slightly above average computer skills. I've told them I can't actually code, but apparently making basic excel sheets is good enough for them.
You can go a very long way with functions, if/else, and for-loops.
Anything beyond conditional formatting is seen as the work of the Divine, it seems.
Spill functions blow people's minds. First time I slapped a FILTER on something in the middle of a conference call people were like "What the heck is that?!"
Lol love your username
My first job as a trainee structural engineer I was given the most basic and repetitive structural elements to design. I was asked to design all of the lintels for a development of 20 houses, the boss expected this to take me 1-2 weeks. It took me 1 day to learn the process and design 1 house. I had taken an Excel class in school so at the end of the 1st day I built a simple spreadsheet to calculate the load on a lintel, and then compare it to the load capacity for various gauge lintels using a clumsy nested IF formula (which was about the limit of my Excel skills back then). Next morning the boss said he would check my designs for the 1 house I had completed, but he told me that I needed to pick up the pace a little to hit the deadline of 2 weeks. By the time he came back to me after lunch I had finished the entire task using my spreadsheet. He was both surprised and a little irritated because he now had to find me another task, so he asked me to tally up all the lintel types in a Bill of Materials, probably just to keep me occupied. I used google to find out how to summarise data, found out about Pivot Tables and added that to the spreadsheet. 10 years later I had made a spreadsheet for almost every engineering design task I encountered. Eventually I had a suite of design tools which could output all the necessary calculations plus some diagrams and graphs to form a package of calculations. All the other engineers wanted the spreadsheets to relieve them of the more repetitive aspects of the job, so I became the Excel guy. The only bad thing about that title is users asking you to make changes to the spreadsheets which are incredibly niche use cases which would require an extensive rewrite of the code. Can I rework this to save you a 10 minute task which might arise every few years? Yes, but i'm not going to spend a couple of evenings to do it. [relevant xkcd](https://xkcd.com/1205)
I have come to the conclusion, based on years of experience -- and this doesn't apply just to Excel or other Office products, but across the entire workforce -- that people just have no desire to learn how to work more efficiently.
I always say “hire lazy people”. I’m way too lazy to do stupid stuff. I’ll spend hours on efficiency so I never have to perform the task again.
Just try to open powerquery...
Basically, it's the same with me. I used a sumif and created a pivot table on a spreadsheet I shared, and now im the spreadsheet guy, the IT guy, and anything that has to do with data analytics. All I do is ask chatgpt for the formulas I need and I make bank doing it. I love my job.
Haha, yeah chatGPT is very helpful when you're looking for something proper specific.
My department was given a massive spreadsheet and I was tasked to find all the individual order numbers. I just used the UNIQUE formula to output, then Ctrl, Shift, Down to count it and what took a colleague 2.5 hours just took me 10 seconds.
I have used Ctrl Shift Down more times in the last two weeks than anything else.
It's always the simplest stories that are the coolest. For me my company had a spreadsheet that referenced a range. Every once in a while someone would type in a cell which didn't allow it to spill over it. We would send it to IT and operations for that would stop until a couple days later when they would send it fixed. One day I decided to look at the file with no real hope. I happened to notice a single cell with something in it while all the other ones were blank. I deleted the number and boom, magic. The range worked again. You would think I had shown a magic trick to little kids by their reactions
I had a similar situation happen too when I joined a new team. There was a spreadsheet where they would enter a number and another cell would join text to add a bunch of 0's to fit a format. It would break all the time and by break I mean the cell with the formula would reach a row it wasn't in OR a hidden row next to it reached a point with the 0's weren't no longer in and they would send this to IT to fix. I took it upon myself to remove the hidden row and have one reference point to '000000000'. Then I immediately protected the column with the formula so no one could accidentally type in it. That was a lot of words to say: lock your formulas!
In an interview 15 years ago, my (near retirement) boss-to-be asked me to rate my Excel skills from 1-10. Trying to be modest, I said 7-8. He came back with “well if you know how to do an IF statement, you’re a 10 in my book.” I just laughed and said yeah I know how to do them, but in my head I was thinking that IF statements was a 10, I was a 15. Anyway, if I would have been more experienced, I would have known to run for the hills. The level of technical knowledge in general in that company was basically at the level of struggling to do Sums in Excel. I ended up being a semi-IT guy along with my regular job, which I of course didn’t get any extra pay for.
I’m the excel girl at my new job. Admittedly I’ve learned a ton of excel functions since I started, and I’m pretty impressed with myself. My coworkers and managers know very little excel and are continuously shocked at what I can do. They are very appreciative and it also earned me a raise within a few weeks of starting. I was able to build a report no one else could, that ended up netting is a substantial rebate. And now I’m just obsessed with what else I can improve.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread: |Fewer Letters|More Letters| |-------|---------|---| |[AVERAGEIFS](/r/Excel/comments/1cdsr2q/stub/l1exd5t "Last usage")|[*Excel 2007*+: Returns the average (arithmetic mean) of all cells that meet multiple criteria.](https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/averageifs-function-48910c45-1fc0-4389-a028-f7c5c3001690)| |[CONCAT](/r/Excel/comments/1cdsr2q/stub/l1g8am9 "Last usage")|[*2019*+: Combines the text from multiple ranges and/or strings, but it doesn't provide the delimiter or IgnoreEmpty arguments.](https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/concat-function-9b1a9a3f-94ff-41af-9736-694cbd6b4ca2)| |[CONCATENATE](/r/Excel/comments/1cdsr2q/stub/l1fg1fi "Last usage")|[Joins several text items into one text item](https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/concatenate-function-8f8ae884-2ca8-4f7a-b093-75d702bea31d)| |[COUNT](/r/Excel/comments/1cdsr2q/stub/l1f8t6b "Last usage")|[Counts how many numbers are in the list of arguments](https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/count-function-a59cd7fc-b623-4d93-87a4-d23bf411294c)| |[COUNTA](/r/Excel/comments/1cdsr2q/stub/l1fra1j "Last usage")|[Counts how many values are in the list of arguments](https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/counta-function-7dc98875-d5c1-46f1-9a82-53f3219e2509)| |[COUNTIF](/r/Excel/comments/1cdsr2q/stub/l1oe7h7 "Last usage")|[Counts the number of cells within a range that meet the given criteria](https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/countif-function-e0de10c6-f885-4e71-abb4-1f464816df34)| |[COUNTIFS](/r/Excel/comments/1cdsr2q/stub/l1oe7h7 "Last usage")|[*Excel 2007*+: Counts the number of cells within a range that meet multiple criteria](https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/countifs-function-dda3dc6e-f74e-4aee-88bc-aa8c2a866842)| |[DB](/r/Excel/comments/1cdsr2q/stub/l1ig2rw "Last usage")|[Returns the depreciation of an asset for a specified period by using the fixed-declining balance method](https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/db-function-354e7d28-5f93-4ff1-8a52-eb4ee549d9d7)| |[FILTER](/r/Excel/comments/1cdsr2q/stub/l1j3jn1 "Last usage")|[*Office 365*+: Filters a range of data based on criteria you define](https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/filter-function-f4f7cb66-82eb-4767-8f7c-4877ad80c759)| |[FIND](/r/Excel/comments/1cdsr2q/stub/l1fg1fi "Last usage")|[Finds one text value within another (case-sensitive)](https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/find-findb-functions-c7912941-af2a-4bdf-a553-d0d89b0a0628)| |[HSTACK](/r/Excel/comments/1cdsr2q/stub/l1ej19v "Last usage")|[*Office 365*+: Appends arrays horizontally and in sequence to return a larger array](https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/hstack-function-98c4ab76-10fe-4b4f-8d5f-af1c125fe8c2)| |[IF](/r/Excel/comments/1cdsr2q/stub/l1j7v4a "Last usage")|[Specifies a logical test to perform](https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/if-function-69aed7c9-4e8a-4755-a9bc-aa8bbff73be2)| |[IFERROR](/r/Excel/comments/1cdsr2q/stub/l1lxpe8 "Last usage")|[Returns a value you specify if a formula evaluates to an error; otherwise, returns the result of the formula](https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/iferror-function-c526fd07-caeb-47b8-8bb6-63f3e417f611)| |[INDEX](/r/Excel/comments/1cdsr2q/stub/l1hwn59 "Last usage")|[Uses an index to choose a value from a reference or array](https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/index-function-a5dcf0dd-996d-40a4-a822-b56b061328bd)| |[INDIRECT](/r/Excel/comments/1cdsr2q/stub/l1g8am9 "Last usage")|[Returns a reference indicated by a text value](https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/indirect-function-474b3a3a-8a26-4f44-b491-92b6306fa261)| |[ISNUMBER](/r/Excel/comments/1cdsr2q/stub/l1fg1fi "Last usage")|[Returns TRUE if the value is a number](https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/is-functions-0f2d7971-6019-40a0-a171-f2d869135665)| |[LET](/r/Excel/comments/1cdsr2q/stub/l1eytbi "Last usage")|[*Office 365*+: Assigns names to calculation results to allow storing intermediate calculations, values, or defining names inside a formula](https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/let-function-34842dd8-b92b-4d3f-b325-b8b8f9908999)| |[MATCH](/r/Excel/comments/1cdsr2q/stub/l1hwn59 "Last usage")|[Looks up values in a reference or array](https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/match-function-e8dffd45-c762-47d6-bf89-533f4a37673a)| |[MAX](/r/Excel/comments/1cdsr2q/stub/l1f8koo "Last usage")|[Returns the maximum value in a list of arguments](https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/max-function-e0012414-9ac8-4b34-9a47-73e662c08098)| |[MIN](/r/Excel/comments/1cdsr2q/stub/l1f8koo "Last usage")|[Returns the minimum value in a list of arguments](https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/min-function-61635d12-920f-4ce2-a70f-96f202dcc152)| |[MOD](/r/Excel/comments/1cdsr2q/stub/l1j4n3i "Last usage")|[Returns the remainder from division](https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/mod-function-9b6cd169-b6ee-406a-a97b-edf2a9dc24f3)| |[MONTH](/r/Excel/comments/1cdsr2q/stub/l1g8am9 "Last usage")|[Converts a serial number to a month](https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/month-function-579a2881-199b-48b2-ab90-ddba0eba86e8)| |[OR](/r/Excel/comments/1cdsr2q/stub/l1f3n4g "Last usage")|[Returns TRUE if any argument is TRUE](https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/or-function-7d17ad14-8700-4281-b308-00b131e22af0)| |[SEARCH](/r/Excel/comments/1cdsr2q/stub/l1fg1fi "Last usage")|[Finds one text value within another (not case-sensitive)](https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/search-searchb-functions-9ab04538-0e55-4719-a72e-b6f54513b495)| |[SUM](/r/Excel/comments/1cdsr2q/stub/l1hfh3d "Last usage")|[Adds its arguments](https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/sum-function-043e1c7d-7726-4e80-8f32-07b23e057f89)| |[SUMIF](/r/Excel/comments/1cdsr2q/stub/l1h705s "Last usage")|[Adds the cells specified by a given criteria](https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/sumif-function-169b8c99-c05c-4483-a712-1697a653039b)| |[SUMIFS](/r/Excel/comments/1cdsr2q/stub/l1ifsz7 "Last usage")|[*Excel 2007*+: Adds the cells in a range that meet multiple criteria](https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/sumifs-function-c9e748f5-7ea7-455d-9406-611cebce642b)| |[SUMPRODUCT](/r/Excel/comments/1cdsr2q/stub/l1hgbox "Last usage")|[Returns the sum of the products of corresponding array components](https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/sumproduct-function-16753e75-9f68-4874-94ac-4d2145a2fd2e)| |[TIME](/r/Excel/comments/1cdsr2q/stub/l1fjvbd "Last usage")|[Returns the serial number of a particular time](https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/time-function-9a5aff99-8f7d-4611-845e-747d0b8d5457)| |[TODAY](/r/Excel/comments/1cdsr2q/stub/l1g8am9 "Last usage")|[Returns the serial number of today's date](https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/today-function-5eb3078d-a82c-4736-8930-2f51a028fdd9)| |[UNIQUE](/r/Excel/comments/1cdsr2q/stub/l1edx3u "Last usage")|[*Office 365*+: Returns a list of unique values in a list or range](https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/unique-function-c5ab87fd-30a3-4ce9-9d1a-40204fb85e1e)| |[VLOOKUP](/r/Excel/comments/1cdsr2q/stub/l1ma0gy "Last usage")|[Looks in the first column of an array and moves across the row to return the value of a cell](https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/vlookup-function-0bbc8083-26fe-4963-8ab8-93a18ad188a1)| |[VSTACK](/r/Excel/comments/1cdsr2q/stub/l1ej19v "Last usage")|[*Office 365*+: Appends arrays vertically and in sequence to return a larger array](https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/vstack-function-a4b86897-be0f-48fc-adca-fcc10d795a9c)| |[XLOOKUP](/r/Excel/comments/1cdsr2q/stub/l1ibie6 "Last usage")|[*Office 365*+: Searches a range or an array, and returns an item corresponding to the first match it finds. If a match doesn't exist, then XLOOKUP can return the closest (approximate) match. ](https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/xlookup-function-b7fd680e-6d10-43e6-84f9-88eae8bf5929)| |[XMATCH](/r/Excel/comments/1cdsr2q/stub/l1ggcyt "Last usage")|[*Office 365*+: Returns the relative position of an item in an array or range of cells. ](https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/xmatch-function-d966da31-7a6b-4a13-a1c6-5a33ed6a0312)| |[YEAR](/r/Excel/comments/1cdsr2q/stub/l1g8am9 "Last usage")|[Converts a serial number to a year](https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/year-function-c64f017a-1354-490d-981f-578e8ec8d3b9)| **NOTE**: Decronym for Reddit is no longer supported, and Decronym has moved to Lemmy; requests for support and new installations should be directed to the Contact address below. ---------------- ^(*Beep-boop, I am a helper bot. 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That's exactly why I think the bar to excel at work is low.
I'm an intern, and they had me covering for our L&D admin position when ours quit. Mu manager asked me to automate whatever i can so I automated all the reporting and the metrics with just macros, VBA and a python script on a desktop to run the files and email to my manager. Most of that was just from chatGPT. I also made some tableau dashboards for monitoring. When I showed my manager this it quadrupled my workload and got his assistant laid off. I feel terrible and learned to not tell people what excel is actually capable of. It is crazy to me how little time people put into these things before assuming it can't be done. They think I'm a computer genius and I told my boss a million times I can't actually code but it's in one ear out the other
I worked myself out of my first job this way. My first job out of college was to help a managing director organize her letters of credit. She hand calculated everything and faxed out monthly letters to clients to inform them of required bank wire transfers (interest and principal payments). That was supposed to be my full-time job. I spent 3 days to automate it all with spreadsheets and mailmerge, including spending one night sleeping under my desk to get it done. That whole process took about 45 hours. Spent the next month to trial it out (without telling my boss) to make sure everything worked. Unveiled it only to her because I wouldn’t want to reveal to other staff that her job was a joke. Somehow the head of the firm and a board member found out and I got promoted immediately with a 30% raise and new responsibilities and a new boss. Make others look good and the world is your oyster. P.S. It took me so long (45hrs) only because I had to learn trade finance and was not a spreadsheet expert and had to experiment. This was before you could google shit so you had to play around with it and find out the hard way that the idiotic formula you spend 3 hours constructing was available as a canned formula already. If I had to do this project today, it would probably take me about 30 minutes but only because I’d have to refresh myself on the mailmerge stuff.
I long ago figured out that most accounting software does not prepare financial reports in the way that management wants to see them. So I began figuring out how to download the accounting system's reports, import them into Excel, and, using VBA and formulae only occasionally more complex than VLOOKUP (which is still foreign to many, if not most), develop reports that presented the data in a way that management wanted them. I don't consider myself a guru -- I rely on Google to find out the way other people have addressed the problems I encounter, and don't bank the knowledge -- but I've never come close to meeting anyone in any organization I've ever been in who's as good at Excel as I am.
“ Wait, you know how to use pivot tables? Can I come to you with excel questions?”
I'm doing xlookups these days to get into about multiple columns at the same time, and my boss is like "What the fuck?"
I used Alt + = to perform addition and trust me, all were baffled. Folks literally used a calculator to see whether the output was accurate or not.
I kind of have the opposite thing going on. Lots of people like to do really complex formulas and I'm a noob so I just use a ton of helper columns that I hide and SUMIFS plus INDEX MATCH are the only formulas that I really need.
Honestly, your way is much easier to audit.
When I started I knew basic stuff in Excel like COUNTIF, and some other easier functions. That also blew my managers and supervisors away. Eventually the worksheets I started working on were a little more complex coming from corporate but because I understood what they were doing suddenly I was the excel guy. Since then I've gone on to build full blown dashboards for departments, automated worksheets that pulls data directly from our servers for on the spot analysis. I've been lately getting into Power BI and have now talked the company into purchasing me a pro licence to use for the enterprise. So I'm just going to keep expanding my skill set
I used - and Today() to make things turn red or yellow (permits) if they were going to expire in a week/month. All of a sudden I'm in Mensa. Another trick was Subtract today's date from an arbitrary date in the past to make a number that changes every day. This gave a document a unique serial number that increased by 1 every day for a shipping document. It also filled in all the weights, names, properties and hazzards of the items. All the driver had to do was type how many. Then it populated a second sheet with all that info. Voila! 2 shipping documents! One for the office. One for the driver. Everybody legal.
COUNTIFS() is gonna blow their minds
Yeah I used a mixture of both. COUNTIFS is so damn good lol.
For the past 2 companies, all of them treated me like an excel god, even the other dept called me to ask for explanation. Back then my nested ifs go up to 50 ifs 🤦🏼
Yep, this is why I’m confident AI won’t take away our jobs for the time-being. These people don’t even know how to google, I doubt they’ll be able to use copilot, understand the response, and implement it into their own workbooks.
Became the "excel guy" by taking a 4 hour manual process and automating it to 20 mins with VBA. Nearly automated myself out of that job. So now I'm a bit more discreet and turn in requested reports "just-in-time"
Yes. And the secret is that you have now created FREE TIME FOR YOURSELF.
Almost exactly the same as yours.
Half the people you meet are stupider than you think they are. (Me) Most are like me just wandering around hoping to not have to deal with a whole lot of junk.
I use the quote "Think of how dumb the average person is... Now remember that HALF are dumber than that."
I take pride in automating things. Its all been self-taught because that’s how my whole career with computers has been. I’ve only rarely been around people who know more than me.
Shortly after taking a new job I took a sheet with a massive amount of data and summarized it in a really simple pivot table to get some numbers that someone was looking for. Took me about 10 minutes what apparently was taking several days for the last person to do. I was quite the star there after that LOL
Im also the excel guy. I recorded a macro once after watching a 30 second YouTube video.
Spending 15 minutes to learn how to use excel properly with youtube is underrated. You can smoke people in almost any workplace with very basic excel knowledge.
I got myself into a six figure analytics job just by getting halfway decent at excel formulas, copying and pasting vba, and now power bi. My whole dept thinks I'm some hacker wizard. I'm a mechanic lol
I was assigned duties as data analyst on a project just because I learned pivot tables…
Always done this, it's purely because I'm lazy and hate doing manual repetitive tasks so I pretty much automated my last job. One sales data sheet used to take the previous guy 6 days to produce, by the time I left I had it down to under 3 hours. I told nobody that I'd changed any processes and just worked on my own side hustles to while away the hours.
Good job security
This is so real. Everyone at work treats me like I'm IT because I know basic commands, formulas, and conditional formatting. If they think that's impressive, I'm just going to let them.
I used to be this guy !
Same for me. I have a spreadsheet sheet that summarizes many columns of data using COUNTIF, SUMIF, etc and everyone thinks I’m an Excel wizard. It’s hilarious because my knowledge doesn’t extend beyond IF formulas, VLOOKUP, and utilizing cell tags and whatnot, but I guess that’s far more than the average person in an office 🤷♂️
Now youve done it, now youre their excel guy 😐 for every time a formula deletes itself mysteriously Blow their mind with 'Format Painter' and you'll get a raise
I started a new job in an admin role for a large company. A particular project came in and knowing a bit of excel I created a database with some complex IF loop formulas, blew everyone away and I was soon promoted. Then watched a few YouTube videos on dashboards and VB scripting, made a couple of fancy dashboards with macros and custom slicers, etc, and got promoted again. I'm now head analyst and have tripled my starting salary within 2 years of employment. Excel is awesome :)
COUNTIFS is my life right now, although AVERAGEIFS is making a strong second-place showing. But just wait until they see my dependent dropdown menus.
yeah, I have had a colleague at work who - technically - was educated in Excel, even had training on Pivot-tables. And they then were utterly befuddled when I was cranking out a few COUNTIFs and some other basic functions. I became the go-to-guy there, too. - Just a small advice: If you are the excel guy now, good for you! But don't over-emphasize it. Don't rush through your tasks only because you can, because you might create absurd expectations towards yourself. Make sure that people are not taking advantage of you and your skills and that they are not shoving the work they would rather not do onto you, only because you are one of the few people there who can actually do them competently! ;)
Is it possible to learn this power? Or is this not from a Jedi type things? I’m debating whether to learn Salesforce better or Excel better when I take a year off from work. I work in SaaS. Like how good could i get at Excel in a year? Or better to spend 30 mins a day on Excel, 30 mins on Salesforce.
Bro, a year? You'll learn fucking tons. As, for courses etc, I learned more in two weeks by just being given a task with a spreadsheet than I ever would have by doing a course for a year. I'm not even joking. I would go with excel, and just find a problem that needs solving and just dive in. I knew a little formula stuff when I started but not much. Just had to Google and GPT through it until stuff worked. But once I'd understood how to string a formula together, I didn't just copy paste it for the next one. I'd write it out each time to get comfortable with how it was constructed. It's just all about practice, and actually doing, rather than being stuck in tutorial hell.
Worked at a small logistics firm, one accountant who was a good looking airhead who was definitely sleeping with the owner. She asked me how I would do a spreadsheet once. I used conditional formatting to make negative numbers red and positive numbers green. Completely blew her mind. She was our only accountant.
I initially started knowing nothing of VBA. My supervisor got roped into a hell of a task that he used VBA to automate, and once he left it was given to me (I was team lead at the time) and it had become an integral business process, so I 'had' to learn it. So I did. Within a few months I had gained enough knowledge (vlookup, index/match, pivot tables and basic vba loops) to automate a lot of processes, make reports that exceeded what 'official reports' provided and became 'the process guy' I was well underpaid at that point, so I found a new position doing my old trade of Phone Tech Support, but for the first year I found all their excel/reporting and modified/changes processes, and within that year got on their SQL database team (knowing nothing of SQL, so that whole loop started anew) and increased my pay by about 50% within two years. As much as I say 'I know nothing of excel', those few things truly make mountains, so use it well :) I wish you well on your journey!
I swear!... I think Excel courses are 1,000% worth their weight in gold. Just a WHATIF, and a few VLOOKUPs and you look like a freaking wizard to the slack jawed gumps of the office world. Learn Excel, be a hero.
I made that mistake a few years ago at my last job. I showed my manager a new schedule that I put together that randomizes who is paired with who for the day. That was the day I became the excel guy for all departments for no additional pay with the added bonus of still performing my original duties.
I love this so hard for you
I'm the Excel guy at work I barely know how to work it. Currently I'm using sumproduct function to deduct stock when production occurs. And I'm a genius. My boss and coworkers are thoroughly impressed by the system.
I started as The Excel Girl, then I became The Python Girl, then I became The Cloud Girl. Now I'm a Site Reliability Engineer despite having no IT background 🤷 I haven't a clue what I'm doing but I'll figure it out over the next year or so.
1. SUMIF/S 2. Conditional Formatting (Green, Yellow, Red) 3. Pivot Tables/Charts
This was me when I started my new job. I had only a basic understanding of Excel, but I used ChatGPT heavily to write formulas to make it do what I want, and now apparently, I'm now an Excel whiz... I've even tried showing others in the office how to leverage AI, but they just don't care.. these are the dinosaurs I work with. Most are not even that old either 🙈 Some people just don't like change. These are going to be left behind soon, and honestly, the quicker the better I say.
I took over a process from a colleague. There was an export from payroll system that provided data for a report the client requested. It was done every month and she manually copy-pasted every single value. No way was I going to spend 30-45 minutes every month manually copy-pasting cells, it is boring, useless and leaves too much room for error. I spend 10 minutes setting up the formulas and since then it took a minute to complete, plus 1 minute to cross chceck, if it was ok. Since then I have been the Excel person to go to for questions and moved from payroll to reporting, because I wanted to play with Excel most of the time and be paid for it :-D
I'm a consultant with a focus on everything related to data and analytics. I sometimes question my sanity when I see how customers use (or rather don't use) Excel. I recently got a dashboard in Excel. Not one of the kpis were calculated but rather all of them enteren manually. The underlying data was on the 2nd sheet. Don't even get me started with the complete lack of any thought through IT infrastructure or data pipelines.
I’m not an excel expert like some masterminds but have definitely used simple formulas before and have blown away some people. Who knows what some people out there were doing???
This is fucking stupid. There's got to be a better way. The mindset of an "analyst."
I am the “spreadsheet genius” at work too and it’s so silly because literally all I’m doing is basic formulas, and sometimes more complex ones but I just google a solution then trial and error it until I get it working. A recruiter just used my salary-pay formula worksheet in an HR meeting (working hours times pay rate time number of paid days in the year, all divided by 12 pay periods—we aren’t talking anything crazy here) and my coworkers call me if their “import range” spreadsheet stops working. It’s kind of fun to feel like a god but I’m certainly only barely scratching the surface of the capabilities of excel/Google sheets.
IFERROR and VLOOKUP earned me the moniker “Excel master”
Oh yeah. I'm that guy. So much so that I've built data trackers, linked in drop down boxes to vlookups etc. I'm self taught and love excel.
Similar to your story. Found COUNTIFS during the pandemic when I used it to track quarantined employees coming and going. Very few people have desire to want to learn Excel to help them other than recording numbers. I see some still manually counting thing, or even putting number values and text in the same cells of a column. Drives me crazy. My favorite is when this use it for lists (text) instead of Word. You should get into learning and using Power Query Editor to fetch your data automatically for you if available. It’s powerful.
That's awesome! COUNTIF and COUNTIFS are powerful tools, and it's great that you're getting recognition for using them effectively. It's a familiar story – sometimes, simple Excel functions can make a big impact. Embrace your newfound Excel guru status and keep on impressing!
Same here. I don’t even know VBA but I know how to use ChatGPT to generate the code to automate tasks (even if the code is less than perfect). I work in manufacturing and my job used to be super redundant and required hours of matching finished inventory to upcoming customer orders. This had to be done everyday and used to take at least half a day to do. After some ChatGPT VBA code, it now takes 15 minutes. I just dump the data from SAP into the excel file, press a button and immediately I see which orders are completed and which ones I still need to plan. I have so much spare time now that I’ve been able to take on additional tasks and not feel so rushed all the time. Gaining the sense of control over your job is liberating and any task that you find yourself repeating regularly should be automated as much as possible. I’ve shown a couple of coworkers this and no one seems to realize just how efficient it is but when they run into excel problems, I am always the first one they reach out to.
Being the go to person for excel will quickly make you the spreadsheet technician for the entire office. Speaking from experience, unless your career aspirations are to automate everyone else’s work, set boundaries, or find a new job