Microsoft Excel has gained huge popularity with businesses. It is used in all departments, not just accounting and finance.
Advanced Excel skills can differentiate you from similar candidates. Many companies consider advanced Excel skills (such as pivot tables and vlookups) to be a standard job requirement.
If you lack this knowledge, don’t worry, there are lots of resources to learn these skills!
Microsoft’s Excel Training Center
Microsoft created the Office Training Center: a resource center for all of their Office applications and services. Their training center for Excel has numerous free tutorials, videos, and guides on Windows, Mac OS, Android, iOS, and Windows Phone that cover both the latest version of Excel as well as the older ones.
Once you click into a platform, you’ll find resources divided by Excel ability: for beginners (like basic math and creating a chart), for intermediate users (like sorting and filtering data, conditional formatting, and VLOOKUPs), and for advanced users (like pivot tables, advanced IF functions, and how to password-protect worksheets and workbooks).
This site is full of helpful Excel tips collected by an Excel expert named John Walkenbach.
Over the past thirty years, Walkenbach has written more than 60 Excel books for users of all levels and around 300 articles and reviews for magazines.
The most helpful part of his website is the Excel Tips tab, which has a long list of useful tips on formatting, formulas, charts and graphics, and printing. The tips in there include everything from working with fractions, to unlinking a pivot table from its source data, to a spreadsheet protection FAQ sheet.
Another helpful part of his site is the Downloads tab, where he’s added free, download links to files he created, including free Excel workbooks and add-ins. Some of the files demonstrate useful techniques that you can adapt to your own work, and others are simply “for fun.”
The secret to Excel is repetition. Once you learn a new skill, go back and do it over and over again each week. If you don’t use it, you will lose it.
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