I have been working with Excel for about 20 years.
I played around with it a bit in college and then started using it professionally at the Boston Consulting Group. I then spent 10 years at Deutsche Bank as a business manager. There was a lot of data analysis and financial performance reporting.
I've been self-employed for about six years, so I've basically used Excel my entire career.
Winning the Excel World Championship was a great feeling. For a long time I was doing poorly in the knockout stages. Every year I entered the knockout round as the first or second seed. I've made it to the final stage in Las Vegas over the last few years, but before that, fifth place was my best result.
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My number one piece of advice for office workers is: believe there is a better way.
Whenever you think, “Oh God, I've been copying and pasting for 10 minutes and I still have 15 left,” whenever you're doing something manually and repetitively, it's very possible that Excel has a better solution for it.
It's also very likely that if you ask Google or ChatGPT to briefly describe what you need, a thousand or more people have wanted to do exactly the same thing over the years.
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In my experience, 80 percent the things I ever had trouble with in Excel could be solved by typing a fairly precise description into Google – and somewhere there was already a post explaining how to do it.
Learning how to use the features SUMIFS it will probably take you longer the first time than doing it “by hand”. But the second time it will be a little faster, the third time it will be a lot faster, and for the thousand times you have to do it over the course of your career, it will be a billion times faster.
There is also much less risk of errors or inexplicable mistakes that often occur during manual work.
It will take a little longer the first time, but if you're new and the youngest person in the company, everyone still expects you to do things slowly and not very smartly. So if you do something for a long time the first time and 10 times faster the second time, the benefits over the next six months – not to mention your entire career – are enormous.
As you start to explore more of these features and combine them into more and more complex solutions, the return on investment increases exponentially.
Thanks to the time saved – look from a distance
It's great to be able to go through the model very, very quickly and say, “The answer is seven.” If you get to it quickly, you have more time to ask, “Does it even make sense that the answer is seven?”
This is what junior bankers or juniors in consulting are least likely to do. They see their role as “turning the crank” in the model, returning the result, and then someone higher in the hierarchy asks: what does that mean? What is the conclusion? Does this make sense?
Taking the time to do your own analysis and communicate it gives you much more credibility. It also increases the chances that you'll spot your own stupid mistakes before someone else does.
What scares me the most is when I see a formula with 50 different numbers, e.g.
A1 + B3 + C5 + D10.
Someone obviously entered them manually or clicked: plus, click, plus, click, plus, click.
The amount of time it takes and the risk of mis-clicking once and creating an error you'll never be able to find are enormous.
This is one of the most basic paths leading astray. At every skill level in Excel, there's something you're doing wrong – and you don't realize it until you get to the next level. Problems are everywhere, all the way to the top.
When we get to the right stage, I think AI will be very helpful in taking people from “poor” to “fair” and maybe even from “poor” to “good”. It probably won't help much for people like me who already have a lot of experience.
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If it gets to the level where AI can teach me new things in Excel, there's not much room left for human Excel users.
I have about 50 thousand. tricks. When I worked at BCG, I often conducted Excel training. Every now and then you would learn someone something new and see a mixture of joy and terror on their face. And then you heard: “If I had known this last night, I wouldn't have had to work until 2 a.m.”
This is the person who will never forget what you just taught them.
The above text is a translation from the American edition of Business Insider
