<p>I have heard that proficiency in Excel is a great way to land many business major related jobs. I have attempted to self teach myself just by playing around with the Excel program but does anybody know of a good tutorial that is either free or available for purchase? </p>
<p>Online searches have yielded sub par, mostly confusing tutorials. An easy to follow step-by-step tutorial would be of so much help to me. If anyone has any suggestions please share them here. Thank you.</p>
<p>There are a lot of books on Excel tutorial so you can pick one up. Any financial modeling with Excel books will be sufficient and most likely be step by step. You can also pick up a few tricks if you just youtube some Excel videos.</p>
<p>If you are lucky, there may be a class at your school which is oriented towards using Excel heavily. Look for a Finance or SCM/Operations management class which is about modeling things in Excel(or "spreadsheets, generically). That way you can gain the skills and have something to point to as proof you did.</p>
<p>If you never worked in finance sector, I’ll be very careful using proficient and excel in a same sentence. At this point in your life, it’s best for you to learn the basics and know the general idea of excel. Everything else, you’ll learn through your job.</p>
<p>Before my internship in a finance department, I felt that I was a above average in terms of excel skills. Many of my friends and families would ask me first when they had questions about excel. After all, I’ve been using excel I was in a middle school. But, I was wrong big time.</p>
<p>There are so much things you can do with excel and there’s no way for you to know everything. Just learn the basics and understand the general idea of excel. Training will be provided through your job but if don’t have a strong foundations in excel, you simply can not keep. To give you an example, average people type 35-50 words per minute and only few can type 100 wpm. I saw my self as 50-60wpm in excel in the finance department; in the finance department, everybody was typing 100wpm.</p>
<p>latestgood, what types of things do you do so everyone can get an idea?</p>
<p>VLOOKUP
Pivot Tables
Descriptive Statistics
LINEST
Write your own macros?
Use standard macros
Use macros specific to your company
Use custom VBA add-ons
Use premium VBA add-ons
Solver?</p>
<p>etc?</p>
<p>Trying to get an idea for how sophisticated the things you do are and how many of them are clever time savers most don’t know. For example, doing something in 5 seconds using 2 steps that others take 30 seconds to do in 4 steps. Or are you mostly talking about complicated things using Excel functions or add-ons most students won’t have heard of?</p>
<p>Jonahrubin,</p>
<p>Our model is primarily made up of: </p>
<p>VLOOKUP
Pivot Tables
Descriptive Statistics
VBA</p>
<p>and it’s a plus if know macro. Of course, there may be more, but many of our financial data is made up with an above items</p>
<p>It’s both, finance staff knows a lot of shortcuts and there are a lot of complicated formulas. To give you an example, when given a excel model, if I can duplicate a data in 20 minutes, financial analyst with one year experience can probably do it in 2-3 minutes.</p>
<p>You simply can not learn everything about excel. Just learn the basics and have a strong foundation; because if you do not, you can not keep up.</p>
<p>More important than just knowing how to simplify a large quantity of data is having a sharp eye. In the finance world, everyone eventually becomes good with excel. Not everyone will know why certain models are built a specific way. If you understand the values of certain models and how it plays a role in your business, you will be far better off than someone who can build a model in 2-3 minutes and not understand the reason behind it.</p>
<p>Excel is important but you should also learn databases and unix. Pick up a book on SQL sever, learn it.</p>
<p>Very true, each formula in excel has a reason;you have to understand how different formulas ties in together. It definitely helps if you receive good training and have an experienced manager who can guide you.</p>