As an aspiring leader, it is important to understand how Microsoft Excel can help you with your workflow, reporting, data analysis and forecasting. Excel plays a critical role in improving your ability to make informed decisions, easily scan relevant information, and communicate data in a concise and timely manner for the benefit of your stakeholders, writes Forbes author Rachel Wells.
For example, you can use Excel spreadsheets to create, track, and control your departmental budgets and expenses. It can help you identify reporting discrepancies to ensure you’re checking the accuracy of your numbers, and can visually highlight any trends or critical issues related to your project or team’s performance. It is also very effective for project management in terms of project planning, timelines and even creating Gantt charts.
Below are five Excel skills you should work on this year:
1. Cell references
To begin with, everything you need to know about using Excel depends on your understanding of cells, rows and columns and how to relate to them so that you can manipulate the contents of each to retrieve, calculate and analyze the data you need. If you’re relatively new to Excel, it’s always a good idea to take a crash course in the basics and play around with it. Take the time to understand how cells interact with each other and their naming conventions.
You can find many Excel courses on LinkedIn Learning, Coursera, and Udemy.
2. Excel formulas
There are literally hundreds of Excel functions to choose from, with some estimates ranging around 500. These functions reduce calculation time and summarize data for a simple display. It’s easy to get overwhelmed by the sheer number of functions one must learn to be considered at an advanced or expert level in Excel. The important thing to remember, though, is that you’re not likely to use all 500 or more at work.
Focus on learning a few at a time for the most basic tasks and progress as you become more confident. For example, you can start by learning formulas that adjust a date and time, add a set of numbers across multiple cells, rows, or columns, or ones that multiply or divide given numbers.
Some of these basic formulas are known as SUM, COUNT, and AVERAGE.
3. Filter and sort data
If you’ve downloaded a CSV from your CRM or other software, for customer traffic information or performance trends for your team that you’d like to analyze, it makes it much easier to find key details by using the data filtering options available via the icon funnel on the Excel toolbar instead of endlessly scrolling through hundreds or even thousands of rows.
Familiarize yourself with the sort function so that you can arrange the data in columns in ascending or descending order, depending on what you want to display.
4. Graphs and charts
Did you know that you can use Excel to quickly create any type of graph or chart that you can then embed into your PowerPoint presentation for your next stakeholder meeting? Excel features allow you to select ranges of data to format into pie charts, bar charts, and line charts, and you can also customize each for visual appeal.
5. Pivot tables
This might not necessarily be classified as a basic Excel skill level, but it’s still worth mentioning here because pivot tables are a powerful way to visualize, summarize, and analyze data sets relatively easily. Definitely worth considering if you want to continue to grow in the field of data analytics.
When you acquire Excel skills, even at a basic to intermediate level, you’ll be able to build on your analytical and forecasting skills, plan strategically, assess risk, and use the conclusions you draw from your data analysis to enable continuous improvements to reach of organizational goals. Start developing this invaluable skill set so you can be a more strategic and effective leader.
