Excel Mastery with Daily Practice
How, specifically, do I get better at Excel?
I understand that you need to practice, but what does the specific daily practice look like?
At the start of my career, once I had learned how to use excel and how to tell a story with it, I needed to learn how to be “So Good They Can’t Ignore You”. I knew I had to come up with a daily practice routine that would constantly level up my Excel abilities, but I had no idea where to start.
I needed to crush the standard timeline to learn Excel and get good fast.
For me to be able to learn Excel quickly and become one for the top Excel power users in my company, I had to establish a daily practice regime that included the following:
- I needed to be fast (Excel shortcuts)
- I needed to be efficient (fastest formulas and best practices)
- I needed to be great (value add and go above and beyond on every request)
If you’re just starting out in your career or just want to become an excel powerhouse, I’ll try to save you some time and give you the daily practice routine that helped me become one of the top Excel power users at my company.
Daily Practice #1: I needed to be fast (Excel shortcuts)
In my first year at my job, my keyboard didn’t have a single blemish — all of my excel work was done on the mouse. I needed to get faster and keyboard shortcuts were the way to do it.
The key to learning keyboard shortcuts is to start with the most used. Below are the shortcuts that I learned first — study this list and learn anything that you don’t know. As for what the daily practice looked like, the practice that worked for me was to learn 1 keyboard shortcut each day. Now, I don’t mean use the shortcut once that day and you’ll have it learned. I mean that for that entire day and every day after you learn that shortcut, you are not allowed to use the mouse for that task; force yourself to do this. If 1 shortcut/day is too much, try to learn one a week, but apply the same principle that I described above.
After learning keyboard shortcuts, navigation in Excel was a breeze; Excel was becoming an extension of me.
Daily Practice #2: I needed to be efficient (latest formulas and best practices)
Keyboard shortcuts gave me the speed, but I was still using the basic formulas that I learned when I first started — I needed to stay up on the latest formulas and gain more efficiency.
The process that I used to stay up on the latest formulas and best practices was to, each week, write a summary, or make a short how-to video, of a formula that I didn’t know. If it’s too difficult to do one each week, you could do one each month. It took me about an hour to create a how-to video on a new formula. For each video, I had to explain the formula and, most importantly, give examples of how to use the formula, which is where the real learning came from. If the summaries and/or videos are done well, meaning there was a good amount of research that went into it, you will also learn best practices of how to use/apply those formulas too.
Learning the latest and greatest formulas is key to becoming an expert with Excel.
Daily Practice #3: I needed to be great (value add and go above and beyond on every request)
I now had the speed and efficiency that I needed to get good with Excel, but the true power of Excel is applying this speed and efficiency to your specific field in a way that improves your company or your own business.
To become great with excel, you need to a do a few things:
Add value with your excel skills
- What do I mean by “add value”? For whatever you’re working on in excel, add additional analyses (using the latest formulas, graphs, charts) to go beyond the initial request and add something more. Doing this consistently will show your colleagues and managers what excel can do and that you’re the person to go to to have something done well.
Improve upon your excel skills each time
- Each time that you add more and/or add value to an analysis or a project, the added work becomes the new standard. If you added cool charts or graphs on the previous analysis, you should add those again, but then push your abilities by adding more. Just like with what I mentioned in the shortcuts section above, each time that you improve, the improvement is your new baseline. After consistently doing this, you’ll look back and be amazed at what you’ve accomplished.
Consistently doing the above practices will put you in the top percentile of Excel users and I guarantee you’ll be proud of what you’ve accomplished.
