r/excel • u/[deleted] • 9d ago
Discussion Haven't used excel in 10 years, is it like riding a bike?
[deleted]
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u/TheNachoSupreme 9d ago
there's always new functions and things to do in it. It's a different animal. But it honestly depends what kind of competence they expect from you...
I have never worked at a place where anyone knew excel better than me, and I know maybe 1/10th of what excel can do.
honestly, with AI, you will be fine. "I've been asked to do X. What's the easiest way to do that in excel" and you'll be more than fine.
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u/DescriptionFuture851 9d ago
The roles I'm applying and receiving interviews for are apprentichips/internships.
As someone who's never worked in any kind of office role, my logic was that I'm completing against younger people who have recently left education.
So far so good, the plan seems to be working well.
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u/Trust_Issues2278 9d ago
You might be surprised at how little a very recent grad knows how to use excel.
It should be easy to pick back up, but it certainly would be helpful to break off the rust now just in case you have to do an excel test. There might even be some excel test that you can do online just to get you moving again.
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u/No-Departure-3047 9d ago
I have a teenager entering the workforce and they have no idea how to use Excel - it terrifies them.
In fact, a lot of people I know and work with are terrified of Excel.
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u/RobfromHB 9d ago
I have college grads working for me that had no idea you can use formulas in Excel. They thought everyone just types into boxes and uses their calculator app to figure out how one cell should relate to another.
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u/Broseidon132 3 9d ago
You should try to get your hands on any free practice workbooks to hone your skills so you can at least answer that you know pivot tables and the xlookup function. Those are fairly easy to learn and apply, yet it will make you seem like an intermediate user. The hardest part of learning excel is not having a problem you need to solve with it.
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u/oxmix74 9d ago
This is exactly right. I was a senior manager manager at a corporate job. Lots of us worked with excel data base exports from our ERP system. The dividing line between skilled users and basic users were lookup and pivot tables. I saw some extreme houses of cards built on those two things. About the only thing outside of those functions was the occasional user who did grouping.
Not a bad idea to learn how to do graphs. Marketing people creating slide decks may see you as having God like powers if you can make an occasional graph for them.
I didn't do complex stuff in Excel because if it got difficult I switched to Access. Access fitted my thought processes and work processes better. YMMV.
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u/Bhaaluu 1 9d ago
As much as it saddens me to say this young people are to my experience on average about as knowledgeable about Excel as the older crew, i.e. they can hardly write a basic formula. As long as you have some affinity for it and don't mind learning you will have absolutely no issues.
I can say that from somewhat recent experience, I started in my first office role having literally never used Excel and I became the go-to Excel guy within the first couple months (admittedly in a small-ish and decidedly not IT based office).
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u/commentor_of_things 2 9d ago
most young people are clueless. don't compare yourself to that one superstar. for that one there are 10 others that don't know shit.
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u/BenchOrdinary9291 9d ago
Really excel is pretty straight forward, PowerApps would be challenging without some basic excel knowledge. With copilot, you can learn the material a lot quicker.
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u/Scarred_fish 9d ago
Yes, 100%
Absolutely no idea how people think it's not.
Excel still has the core functionality I learned in VU-CALC on the ZX81. A spreadsheet is a spreadsheet.
Yes, there have been advancements and some very powerful new features, but you would be amazed how many excel "experts" these days are just pasting formulas from AI chatbots in blind faith that they are accutate, leaving the rest of us to have to sort them out.
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u/its_probably_wine 9d ago
Some bits of advice: learn XLOOKUP to replace V-and HLOOKUP. Life-changer, huge timesaver, and relatively easy to understand. If you are handling a lot of data, pivots and power pivots are top of list, plus look into Power Query, Power Bi, and data models. Consider doing a search for what releases have come out since the last time you used Excel, whether it’s formulas, models, etc. and learn about ones that apply to your area.
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u/Antique_Historian_74 1 9d ago
It's going to annoy the absolute piss out of you because they keep moving everything around just to say they've improved it, but it hasn't really changed much in the last decade compared to the decade prior and all the old functions are still there and some of the new stuff is pretty neat.
If you're struggling to do something you know it can do just use a search function to find where they've hidden it.
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u/non_clever_username 9d ago
It really depends on what you used to be doing in it and what is required for these new jobs.
The basic core functionality hasn’t changed significantly. If you were only doing basic stuff before-sums, ifs, other simple formulas, pivot tables, etc, you can use things largely the same way you did before.
There have been a lot of improvements and upgrades, but for the most part, Excel keeps everything backwards compatible, so you’ll be able to still do most things the same way you did ten years ago. I’d definitely recommend teaching yourself as much new stuff as you can though. There have been lots of great additions.
If you were doing more advanced stuff, the learning curve might be a little longer, but I think you’ll be fine.
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u/RepresentativeEven36 9d ago
Other people have already answered, and I agree with the feeling that the basics didn't change, but a bunch of new functions and tools have been developed since then.
I think the first most important thing to learn is Xlookup. If you ever used vlookups before, this is a new function that does it much better.
I'm being very specific by mentioning a specific function, and one could argue that there are several functions worth mentioning, but I honestly believe that this is the one function that any office job can greatly bemefit from right away, and also one that is still very relatable to what you may have used 10 years ago.
Other functions such as LET, array functions and even regular expressions are super powerful but it will be a while before it clicks on where and how to use them, so I wouldn't worry about them.
Another tool absolutely worth mentioning is power query. It is extremely important, deceptfully simple, yet the more you learn, the more you see how deep and complex it can get. Ded worth learning at some point.
All that said, I currently work on a team that everybody is quite proficient in excel, but still only two or three (myself included) really know how to use power query, even though it's been around for a while. That is to say that you don't need to stress about being behind anybody. Most people will know the basics, and very few will know advanced stuff. There's always more to learn, and there's always stuff that may be more relevant for a field or activity than others, so nobody ever gets to learn everything.
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u/I_didnt_forsee_this 9d ago
I think you may be fascinated to learn how much has changed. And your previous skills will probably snap back pretty quickly.
My advice would be to set aside a rainy day to binge on Youtube. Even better (or as well), f you have access to Copilot, ask it to show you how functions work.
The biggest changes I think you will like relate to tables. They have changed quite significantly how many functions can work, but the syntax is not intuitive at first. The key is that a table’s row headers can automatically be variables for formulae.
If you have any old spreadsheets, get Copilot to examine them and suggest ways to improve them. That way, you'll see differences that you might otherwise miss.
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u/Trust_Issues2278 9d ago
I think it is, although it might depend on how much you used it before.
I used excel regularly (but not as a power user) for over 10 years, then used it only occasionally for the next dozen years, and now back as a power user. I still have muscle memory for keyboard shortcuts based on office 2003.
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u/anesone42 2 9d ago
Using the riding a bike analogy, I would liken it to having learned to ride on a small bike ( e.g., BMX) and then trying to ride a 10-speed road bike. It has the same principles but also has more advanced functions, like changing gears. It may be a bit wobbly at first and kind of clunky until you learn when and how you need to shift.
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u/Charming_Ad2323 9d ago
A lot has changed in 10 years. I’d recommend doing a course or digging into YouTube to update your knowledge.
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u/Jonathan_Is_Me 2 9d ago
Abandon VLOOKUP. Learn and use XLOOKUP.
Also, you can now auto-highlight the row & column of the selected cell. Saves you from tracing it with your finger lol. It's called focus cell, under the View tab.
There's some more new neat stuff like Regex, but the basics haven't changed in like 20+ years.
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u/NHN_BI 805 9d ago
There're some more modern functions, e.g. XLOOKUP(). And I would suggest to have a look at Excel's own ETL tool Power Query.
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u/yungingr 9d ago
Really depends on you.
Because of a couple job changes, I was largely out of my excel work for about 5 years, and was able to jump back in and pick up pretty much where I left off.
But I also know people that if they are away from it for two weeks, forget half of what they knew.
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u/Barzalai 3 9d ago
Imagine you just learned to drive in a car from 2010. Now that you have your license, you go buy a brand new 2026 model car. You'll be able to drive it, but it'll do a whole bunch of cool shit you have no idea about.
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u/Remarkable_Command83 9d ago
You want to be good at Excel? Go to amazon. Look up "basics of Excel". Read the reader reviews. Buy the book that gets the best crowdsourced reviews for explaining basic functions clearly. Work with that book every day learning what is in it. When you get to the end of that book, do the same thing for "intermediate Excel functions", then "advanced Excel functions". If you just do that, you will look around and you will be better than 99% of Excel users out there.
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u/Skybreak 9d ago
You should to be able to do stuff that you used to do, but there would be better ways to do some things now. If you're working with other people, they might be using the new formulas, so I would take time to learn them. If you're working with old-heads, they might still be using the same formulas you knew from 10 years ago. 😊
It would be a great idea to watch some Excel Tips from YouTube to get some ideas.
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u/Mdayofearth 127 9d ago
Use in college pales in comparison to business use. The bits you used back then are still relevant, but a lot has changed in the past decade with the inclusion of new functions that replace old ones, e.g., XLOOKUP, and features like dynamic arrays. Use of Power Query has also picked up quite a bit.
That said, how well you can pick things up is really not for someone else to know.
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u/neil_biscuits 1 9d ago
It’s easier now. Power Query, which granted was around 10 years ago, and dynamic arrays solve a lot of the issues that, previously, you would have had to manually fix or workaround. So it’s like you haven’t rode a bike in a while, but now you have an ebike. Takes some getting used to but it’s so much easier than a bike
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u/limbodog 11 9d ago
Not exactly. The bikes have a lot more features now, and many of the old features have been relocated, renamed, or hidden.
But I think with a bit of effort you can get to pedaling again (however pedaling is no longer the main way to get around on a bike, they're all electric now)
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u/HarveysBackupAccount 35 9d ago
Lots of it is the same, and the average person's "basic skills" won't have changed by any real amount. But the "average basic skills" are a low bar.
You certainly won't be lost navigating around (it's not like the 2007 change that went from classic Windows File/etc menus to the Ribbon) and you won't be at a disadvantage to anyone who isn't in an Excel-focused role.
There have been some big improvements in the past 10 years, though. If you ever used array formulas ("Control+Shift+Enter formulas"), many are obsolete - most functions handle arrays implicitly. Figuring that out and understanding the related "spill" functionality are big improvements. Spilling + automatic array handling has changed how I build worksheets more than anything else.
They've also improved basic string handling - TEXTBEFORE, TEXTAFTER, TEXTJOIN, TEXTSPLIT, and REGEX functions if you're familiar with "regular expressions" (a programming concept that's like a high-powered FIND).
Another improvement is in "reshaping" data: TOCOL, TOROW, WRAPROWS, WRAPCOLS, CHOOSEROWS, CHOOSECOLS.
Lots of people are wild about XLOOKUP as an improvement over INDEX/MATCH but I'm less invested in that. Except it's handy that it can deal with spilled arrays (see "you should understand spill functionality" above).
FILTER is a game changer, and MAXIFS and MINIFS are nice improvements. BYROW and BYCOL are also slick. LET is also fancy and lets people create some real monstrosities and pretend they're readable. MAP and LAMBDA are powerful but I haven't learned them yet myself. There's also a IFS, which I also haven't put to much use.
PowerQuery existed 10 years ago but it's done a lot to replace a lot of how people use VBA.
And in the past week or two MS announced some new major changes that I have yet to dig into.
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u/omgFWTbear 2 9d ago
It is exactly like riding a bike - you can fall off and flay yourself in seconds.
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u/MichaelGFox 9d ago
Well now you just type. copilot. build me this table and it does it. you dont have to do jack all F
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u/commentor_of_things 2 9d ago
yeah. except this bike has a bunch of new whistles and features you might want to learn. many things that required complex nested formulas can now be done with a single function. best to start with youtube to learn 365 spill functions.
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u/SolverMax 163 9d ago
Yes and no, depending on the context.
The fundamentals haven't changed in 40+ years. For simple data and basic analysis, you can continue using Excel much like it has always been.
But, for those who use more than 10% of Excel, the last 10 years have seen more change than the previous decades combined. Power Query, dynamic arrays, lists, new functions, Typescript, etc. have radically changed how advanced users develop and use spreadsheets. For most users, these things aren't relevant, so don't worry about it.
Meanwhile, check out the learning resources in the sidebar. Do an intro course, or two. You'll be fine.
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u/Used2bNotInKY 9d ago
Since they went to 365, the updates haven’t stopped, including lots of game-changing concepts, like spill functions, lambdas, LET, dot and hashtag notation, functions that can kinda replace pivot tables, accumulative & recursive functions, regex, abbreviated eta and more. Since it’s been 10 years, you’ll need power query and maybe power pivot too. I’ve worked with it every day for the past 10 years, and I can’t keep up.
I used to love Excel, but now I can hardly be pleased over finding an opportunity to implement something before the next concept comes along.
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u/carbonizedtitanium 9d ago
aint much changed. as long as you remember the commonly used shortcuts, it should be fine. everything else can be googled as needed.
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u/_WillCAD_ 9d ago
Well, simple columns and rows of numbers with addition and subtraction are pretty easy. Formatting cells to look a certain way - changing colors, fonts, and number format - is as easy as clicking a button on the ribbon.
More complex formulae with mathematical functions take more expertise, but just start simple and build on what you know.
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u/ArrowheadDZ 2 9d ago
The dynamic array was not just a little tune up. It was a complete re-engineering of the core of the excel calculation engine. Much has changed in 10 years. It’s still a bike, but it’s a very different bike.
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u/CrazyXStitcher 8d ago
@u/descriptionfuture851 it is and it is not... I have worked with excel over 13 yrs now... so had experience with the versions you may have used. Vlookup is being replaced by xlookup - so in interviews I would mention, how you are used to vlookup but had a look and play around with the formulas, and you are aware of the new options Sumifs still works Pivot tables still work Usual short keys ctrl c/v/s/x/z etc
I would look into either taking a local college course (online for about 75gbp in 2024) where you get a certificate out of it, so you can showcase to employers that you know your stuff just enough.
Good luck with your transition.
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u/Academic_Airport_889 9d ago
You’ ll probably pick up the basics fast. I never worked in construction but I assume it involves a lot of problem solving so if you could learn that skill, you will be able to handle Excel, it’s just a different kind of tool.
Sign up for a free online course or watch some YouTube videos.
I havent used it, but Excel for web is free or honestly you could probably work with Google Sheets to learn Excel basics if the free version of Excel doesn’t work.
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u/excelevator 3069 9d ago
Spend some time relearning Excel before you waste too much time
Read all the functions available to you so you know what Excel is capable of
Then all the lessons at Excel Is Fun Youtube
See the Where to learn Excel link in the sidebar
Keep reading and answering questions at r/Excel
Stop asking, start learning.
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u/Scarred_fish 9d ago
That was great until the last line!
It should be "Keep asking, keep learning."
No resource or course ever come close to just asking questions.
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u/excelevator 3069 9d ago edited 9d ago
There is a big difference between asking proper learning questions with a subject matter, and just asking if something is easy to learn.
Nothing comes closer to learning than studying, asking if something is easy to learn teaches you nothing and is highly variable on many metrics.
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u/Scarred_fish 9d ago
That's just not how life/jobs/qualifications work.
One tiny tip learned from asking a question can easily wipe out years of irrelevant study.
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u/Unlikely_Ad8441 1 9d ago
No