As an aspiring leader, it’s important to understand how Microsoft Excel can help you with your workflow, reporting, data analysis, and forecasting. Excel plays a crucial role in enhancing your ability make informed decisions, easily scan through pertinent information, and convey data in a concise and timely manner for the benefit of your stakeholders.
For example, you can use Excel spreadsheets to create, track, and have an oversight of your departmental budgets and expenses. It can help you identify inconsistencies with reporting to ensure you verify the accuracy of your figures, and can visually highlight any trends or critical issues relating to your project or team performance. It’s also highly effective for project management, in terms of project planning, timelines, and even creating Gantt charts.
Below are five Excel skills you should work on mastering this year:
1. Cell References
To begin with, anything you need to know about using Excel hinges on your understanding of cells, rows, and columns, and how to refer to them so that you can manipulate the content of each to extract, calculate, and analyze the data you need. If you’re relatively new to Excel, it’s always a good idea to undertake a crash course on the basics and play around with it. Take time to understand how the cells interact with each other and their naming conventions.
You can find plenty of Excel courses on LinkedIn Learning, Coursera, and Udemy, to name a few.
2. Excel Formulas
There are literally hundreds of Excel functions to choose from, with some estimates ranging at around 500. These functions cut short computing or calculating time, and aggregate data for a simplified display. It’s easy to get overwhelmed by the vast number of functions one needs to learn to be considered at advanced or expert level in Excel. However, what’s important is to remember 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 date and time, add a range of numbers in multiple cells, rows, or columns, or ones that multiply or divide given figures.
Some of these basic formulas are known as SUM, COUNT, and AVERAGE.
3. Data Filtering And Sorting
If you have downloaded a CSV from your CRM or other software, for customer traffic information or your team’s performance trends that you would like to analyze, it makes it much easier to find key details by using the data filtering options available via the funnel icon on the Excel toolbar, instead of wading through hundreds or even thousands of rows endlessly.
Familiarize yourself with the sorting feature so you can arrange data in columns according to ascending or descending order, depending on what you’d like to display.
4. Graphs And Charts
Did you know you can use Excel to quickly create any kind of graph or chart, which you can then embed into your PowerPoint presentation for your next stakeholder meeting? Excel’s features allow you to select data ranges for formatting into pie charts, bar graphs, and line charts, and you can also customize each for visual appeal.
5. Pivot Tables
This one might not necessarily be classed as at the basic level of Excel skills, but it still deserves a mention here because pivot tables are a powerful way to visualize, summarize, and analyze data sets fairly easily. It’s definitely worth considering if you want to pursue a career within data analysis.
When you gain Excel skills, even at the basic to intermediate level, you’ll be able to supercharge your analytical and forecasting skills, plan strategically, assess risk, and use the conclusions you make from your data analysis to enable continuous improvements to reach organizational goals. Start developing this invaluable skill set so you can be a more strategic and effective leader.