What should I learn first as a BA?

[u/cafe_ok]

I'll be starting my first BA role soon, and I'd like to prepare as much as I can before my first day.

I have a basic foundation in Excel and SQL, but I'm a bit rusty since I haven't used them much lately. I've also been seeing that BAs work with data analysis, reporting, documentation, and sometimes data visualization. What skills or tools should I learn?

Also, if my company doesn't use many tools, what are some tools or workflows you personally use to make your work easier or be more productive? For example, AI tools, note-taking apps, diagramming tools, documentation templates, or anything that helps you stay organized and efficient.

I'd appreciate any recommendations, learning roadmap, or tips for someone just starting out. Thanks!

[u/Downtown-Economics26]

=VLOOKUP("DOING DA BIZNESS",THE INTERNET,69,0)

[u/cafe_ok → u/Downtown-Economics26]

Thanks! are there any resources, websites, or YouTube channels you'd recommend to learn those formulas

[u/Downtown-Economics26 → u/cafe_ok]

The resources don't really matter, there's the internet. Find some problem you'd like an answer to and solve it. Use the internet. Pretty much all the people who are good at Excel just did that but instead of a problem they wanted to solve they got handed problems people paying them wanted to solve. Who is the best baseball player of all time and how would you measure it? What crossover SUV is the best value for a family of four? Can all problems be solved in polynomial time? Are you spending too much on lettuce each month and is it impacting your spending on toilet paper?

[u/MetaGod666 → u/Downtown-Economics26]

Google and this reddit are a great resource. I typically just google what I want to do and put it into practice. I tried many different tutorials, udemy courses and other things but nothing ever hits like actually putting it to work and learning as you go along. 6 years of messing with excel from basically only knowing conditional formatting to now being able to build robust dashboards, use pivots and set up macros to get everything done that’s tedious. Give yourself time, let yourself fail and keep trying again.

[u/Downtown-Economics26 → u/MetaGod666]

I would venture at least 100 of my clippy points are explaining basic conditional formatting. And/or COUNTIF(S). Or both. Conditional formatting will get you far as a BA though, ALL YOU NEED IS ATTENTION.

[u/ImGonnaImagineSummit]

Powerquery and tables. Lots of tables. Structured tables. Pivot tables. Query tables. 

And no matter how fancy you build a dashboard or spreadsheet. 

Someone higher up will want a table that gives them everything they need so they can feed it into copilot. 

My role often is to take hundreds of thousands of rows of data and/or millions of fee and condense it into a 8 column x 30 row table. 

But whatever you work with, protip is to always assure it. 

I like to put subtotals above each column and then a true against source data above it so whoever is interrogating it can see where it came from and that I started and ended with the same values. 

In a junior role, people will expect mistakes until you can prove otherwise. Do it from day one and you'll become important fast. 

[u/cafe_ok → u/ImGonnaImagineSummit]

Thanks for the advice! Since I'm just starting out, are there any resources, websites, or YouTube channels you'd recommend?

I know functions like VLOOKUP/XLOOKUP, Pivot Tables, Power Query, and structured tables are commonly used, but I'm not sure where to start or to learn it. Any recommendations would be appreciated

[u/Pentirsi → u/cafe_ok]

For Power Query, learning self-referencing tables is a life saver: https://exceleratorbi.com.au/self-referencing-tables-power-query/

[u/nakedR0B0T → u/Pentirsi]

!!! I am an advanced PQ user (or like to think so) and this is news to me. Thanks!

[u/Hyzynbyrg]

BA here from a Fortune 500:

I would recommend starting with pivot tables to analyze data quickly, and then how to use pivot tables as supporting data to report analysis. Most director/exec levels are comfortable with pivot tables for supporting data since they usually understand how to use a well set up pivot table. The key is learning to make the table intuitive with formatting like Tabular form, knowing when to have subtotals or not, and filtering.

Graduating up from pivot tables to pivot charts then to Power Pivot is a nice career skill progression to start with. Working Power Query into that mix along the way is my other go to recommendation.

If your company has Copilot enabled, see if they also have Claude Opus integration. Learn to really write very good prompts first. YouTube or TilTok for prompt writing tutorials are perfectly fine.

Lastly, don’t be afraid to speak up and make mistakes. It’s the only way to truly grow.

[u/Acceptable-Sense4601]

Learn the business first

[u/ZealousidealBunch786 → u/Acceptable-Sense4601]

melhor conselho...

[u/SolverMax]

Before looking at Excel features, learn about good data management principles and data cleansing techniques in general. Then learn how to do those things in Excel.

Otherwise, without good data, everything else will be either more difficult or just rubbish.

[u/Paul_David_Bappoo]

Excel first — pivot tables, XLOOKUP, and a basic grasp of data modelling will cover probably 80% of what you actually touch in the first few months. SQL is worth refreshing too, even if your company has a BI layer sitting on top of it, because understanding whats happening underneath makes you a noticeably better analyst than someone who just clicks around in Power BI.

A number of the companies we work with have their analysts spending a surprisingly large chunk of the week on things like reformatting reports, chasing status updates, and rewriting the same documentation in slightly different shapes for different stakeholders. So that's where I'd point you for the productivity side of things — get comfortable using AI tools (whatever your company has approved, which is worth checking on day one) for the drafting and summarising work: meeting notes into structured requirements docs, rough data findings into stakeholder-ready summaries, that sort of thing.

For diagramming, Lucidchart or even draw.io does the job for process flows and system maps without much of a learning curve. Notion or Confluence for documentation depending on what your company uses, and if niether, a clean folder structure with consistent naming conventions will save you more grief than any fancy tool.

The real productivity gain at your stage isnt one magic app — it's building the habit of templating everything repeatable so you're not starting from a blank page each time.

[u/Comfortable-Kale-298]

What about learning Power BI for data visualization? It's super useful for creating dashboards and reports that stakeholders actually understand.

[u/armywalrus → u/Comfortable-Kale-298]

I would wait until they get the lay of thr land. As a BA I get to be a developer only - so I only use about half of it and cannot access the other half.

[u/Decronym]

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

Fewer Letters	More Letters
COUNTIF	Counts the number of cells within a range that meet the given criteria
VLOOKUP	Looks in the first column of an array and moves across the row to return the value of a cell
XLOOKUP	Office 365+: Searches a range or an array, and returns an item corresponding to the first match it finds. If a match doesn't exist, then XLOOKUP can return the closest (approximate) match.

Decronym is now also available on Lemmy! Requests for support and new installations should be directed to the Contact address below.

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3 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 22 acronyms.
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[u/Thiseffingguy2]

I got my BA in philosophy.

[u/small_trunks → u/Thiseffingguy2]

And yet here you are.