Coming from a banking background, I have used Excel my whole career. I wouldn’t describe myself as one of those who “loves a spreadsheet”, with the go to Secret Santa gift of choice by colleagues being a coffee mug with dubious Excel humour emblazoned on the side. I would however say, I am in awe at just how useful and powerful this piece of software is. There is no comparison between this now ancient Microsoft product, first created in 1985, and the young upstarts from Google and Apple.

It’s certainly bold of the aforementioned challengers to attempt to rival a staple of the workplace for so long. Studies suggest that there are 1.1 billion users of Microsoft’s suite globally, and you wouldn’t be far wide if you suggested that a large proportion of those users tend to congregate in Excel, sharing its users around its more well known friends, Messrs Word, Outlook and Teams. It’s suggested that office staff in particular spend around a third of their working day in Excel, often with no formal training.

Your AI model of choice, and the now slightly redundant web search, are solid methods of learning how to use Excel. However, both take longer than asking your workplace Excel Guru (if you don’t know who this is, it’s probably you) to fix your spreadsheet dilemma. After all, they can do it in minutes, whilst it might take you a few hours. If only they were just as forthcoming in explaining HOW they do it.

The previously mentioned studies suggested that 57% of Excel users in the UK would rate their ability as Intermediate. This is something I ask at the beginning of each course here at Jarrold Training. Interestingly, one such person who rated their ability as 3 from 5 said this after a day of Excel Intermediate training,

“Thanks Gary for a great training session,  a hard job to make Excel interesting but it was genuinely enjoyable and engaging! Great instructions and very well explained. I didn’t realise how much I didn’t know!”

The areas which appear to be the most beneficial, according to those who have been on our Excel Introduction and Intermediate courses are as follows:

• Effective use of the fill handle, by understanding relative and absolute cell addressing.
• When do I need brackets, and when am I using brackets for brackets sake?
• How do I print or create PDF’s without it spilling onto subsequent pages?
• Gaining confidence with functions, other than the SUM function.
• Oddly, the shortcut for dates and times receives the biggest gasps.

We tend to know what we know to get by within Excel. We find a method which works, without considering that there are often far easier, more efficient ways of accomplishing the task.

If you want to grow your confidence with Excel, be one of the 4400 people in the UK who search for Excel Training each month. Just add “Jarrold Training” to the search term.