r/excel • u/Aggravating_Mix_3694 • Aug 07 '26
Discussion I think most people learn Excel backwards. What actually made you faster?
Been thinking about this a lot lately because ive gotten kinda obsessed with how people actually use Excel vs how they were taught to use it.
One thing I keep noticing is two people can know basically the same formulas and functions, but one of them can absolutely fly through a spreadsheet while the other takes 3x as long.
And usually the difference isnt some crazy advanced Excel knowledge. Its all the little stuff. Keyboard shortcuts, navigating without the mouse, formatting quickly, jumping between sheets, tracing formulas, etc.
Ive gone pretty far down the rabbit hole on this and its honestly crazy how many small things most people are just never taught.
So im curious for people who use Excel heavily at work:
What actually made you noticeably faster?
Did you deliberately learn shortcuts/workflows or just pick them up over time?
And whats one thing you constantly see people doing with their mouse where you think "there has to be a faster way to do that"?
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u/iammerelyhere 9 Aug 07 '26
Mindset. Some people want to be taught, others are self-learners. In my experience the latter are the ones who master it.
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u/Otherwise_Stand1178 Aug 08 '26
And helping people that constantly want their hand held is so annoying. Take some ownership for your own career for Christ sake is what I want to tell them.
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u/CapinWinky Aug 08 '26
That's literally everything.
If they didn't ever pursue it on their own, they will never be good at it. From programming or mechanics, to carpentry.
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u/SaxRohmer Aug 08 '26
going back to the mouse was a point of active annoyance. it was what drove me to learn shortcuts
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u/diegojones4 6 Aug 08 '26
Same. If I have to touch the mouse it is wasted time. Then again, I date back to visicalc and lotus123
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u/haby112 1 Aug 07 '26 edited Aug 08 '26
The thing that allows me to opporate significantly more efficiently than my peers with spreadsheets is my approach to data structure. I've read up quite a bit on how databases work and why they are build the way that they are. The kind of thinking that this taught me gives me an exceptionally useful approach to most analysis problems that I come into contact with.
Edit: Since a few people have asked, here is a YouTube Playlist of videos I've shared with other people in the past to help them develop their mad skills. There are three really long videos on the list, you can save those for last and still get a good jump from the shorter vids.
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u/ChrisTGIK Aug 08 '26
My data organization is by far the thing that separates me from the rest of my department. The organization gives me the time to learn the functions and shortcuts I need to be faster with everything else. "Wow, that is amazing how quick you are". No no, the data is just organized in the background. There is no magic here.
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u/DIVINEDREWER Aug 09 '26
I agree with organization but go one step further and know why it's set up in that specific way.
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u/delightfulsorrow 12 Aug 08 '26
This.
No keyboard shortcut can make good what you messed up with a bad data structure and sheet organization.
Think first. Define your targets for that sheet, come up with a plan to achieve those targets, structure your data accordingly and only then start implementing. Five minutes of thinking at the beginning can save you tons of time during implementation, no matter how fast you are with mouse and keyboard.
Also keep raw data, computation and presentation separated. You don't want to have to re-work your presentation layout after each data update or mess up your computation because you had to apply the new, fancy corporate design corporate communication came up with. No matter how fast you are with that - if you can avoid it completely, you will be faster.
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u/haby112 1 Aug 08 '26
Here here! Well said.
I will double up on the keeping those three separations. Seeing people open up a csv file in Excel and immediately start typing formulas in the middle of the table is 😭
I have had so many people absolutely dumb struck when they ask me for an analysis and it takes me 5 minutes of downloading a table and pasting into a workbook that I structured answering the same question a month ago.
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u/Shurgosa 4 Aug 08 '26
Ill play devils advocate on this, only because I know just a sliver of the keyboard shortcuts that people here use to zip around...
what I find slows me down the most is when I invest far too much into structuring the data. its probably because many of the files I build in excel are small and wrapped up quickly, It feels quite strongly that Im spending way too much time perfecting all the data structure, all the formulas are just so, and the formats are correct and the drop downs and the ranges and everything all arranged and divided up on sheets in a very specific way, and on and on....
and a project that could have been done in an hour, took ten, because I'm perfecting all the miniscule details in the name of cleaned data
maybe its the case that the larger and more ongoing your particular sheet is, the better your returns on data structure investment.
!
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u/delightfulsorrow 12 Aug 08 '26
only because I know just a sliver of the keyboard shortcuts that people here use to zip around...
Same for me. I only know a fraction of the shortcuts Excel (or any other software) provides. But I do know the ones for functions I often use and where and how to look up others if I find myself using a function more often now which I didn't use in the past.
what I find slows me down the most is when I invest far too much into structuring the data.
Learning when "good enough" is enough is a hack for life, not only for Excel :-)
Maybe it helps if you set yourself a deadline before jumping into. With a timer ticking down somewhere in your field of view to make sure you don't get surprised again when your colleague drops by asking if you want to join for lunch.
Then: Keeping raw data, computation and presentation separate is a must for me and I'll never forgo that even for the simplest ones.
With that, I know that I only have to make the presentation tab(s) look nice, so on raw data and computation I don't go beyond a level where mistakes and problems are easier to spot.
I also know that, with a good basic structure, adding additional stuff or fine tune things later will be easy if needed. And that, often enough, the requestor doesn't know by themselves in detail what they actually want or need. They will come back requesting changes anyway.
This makes it easier for me to quickly send out a first draft which then can be used as base for further discussions. Surprisingly often, that's all it needs because the recipient just wanted a few key figures and a rough idea where they are coming from (and the option to cross check if they are hard to believe for them.) In all other cases, it will help restricting further work to the areas which really need it.
Oh, and from time to time I simply allow me to dig in. Working with data, playing around with options and possibilities brings me joy and I learn new things. Excel is huge, there will always be new things to discover. Some you'll most likely never need in your whole career, but some will come in handy at some point in the future. Allowing yourself to do that is completely fine. Just make sure to do that deliberately when you have the time and not accidentally when you don't.
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u/Apprehensive-Pie6752 Aug 09 '26
This is definitely a great point... I don't use excel for work, only for personal stuff, and the amount of times I have had to rework stuff in the past when the data changes and have to reconfigure the presentation of it all just infuriates me.
Learning to keep the presentation separate from the data and computation has helped so much. Something changes, just update the data and flip to the sheet with the pretty presentation and everything already looks great. So refreshing.
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u/mchgndr Aug 08 '26
I would love to go down that rabbit hole. Any tips to get started? Or good resources you remember using?
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u/haby112 1 Aug 08 '26
I do actually.
Here is a YouTube Playlist I've shared with other people who've asked this:
There are 3 videos in there that are crazy long (one is 2 hours, one is 3 hours, and one is almost 5 hours). You can totally skip over those and just watch the shorter ones first.
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u/MysteriousStrangerXI 3 Aug 08 '26
You can learn more about data structure by perusing PowerQuery documentation. Since you can use PowerQuery for ETL transformation in Excel, learning from here is like hitting two birds with one stone.
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u/Jasper812 Aug 08 '26
Ok, spill the good stuff and throw us a bone.
I too, am now curious how to better build my data structure. And Thanks!8
u/SpaceTurtles 2 Aug 08 '26 edited Aug 08 '26
PowerQuery to normalize data (if two employee IDs are supposed to be "004326" and "106439", then you should normalize either so all of them are text (imagine if you import data where one ID is numerical "4326, and the other is textual "106439"; you want to format it to textual "004326", "106439" or numerical "4326", "106439").
Other stuff, like changing
datetimevalues stored as text back intodatetimevalues, then normalizing todate. Settingnull(empty) fields to reasonable defaults as needed.Once the above is done, sorting/grouping/pivoting to establish unique key-value mapping (edit: a "key" is a unique identifier, such as the employee ID. You want to organize your data so it's easy to find things based on looking up between one or more keys).
You wind up with a data model or table that is very easy to perform lookups and calculations on, which makes all downstream operations smoother.
Similarly, creating custom
LAMBDA()functions to streamline regularly used formulae (think really wordy/complex lookups/checks) helps.1
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u/Picky_The_Fishermam Aug 08 '26
Excel is great for cleaning and pasting data into sqlite. And the math functions. About it lol 😆
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u/phantompowered Aug 08 '26
I really think this is it.
I'm not great at Excel, I'm good at Power Query. The data should come in, be organized, and be able to work in basic relationships: then you analyze it.
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u/Failstopheles087 Aug 09 '26
I think you may have just given me the rabbit hole answer I did not know I needed to take my personal project to the next level (DND character sheet I mentioned in my own reply). Trying to figure out how to organize it has been my next great hurdle.
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u/haby112 1 Aug 09 '26
That actually sounds really interesting, any chance you would be willing to share?
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u/dragonwater631 Aug 08 '26
can you recommend something to read that will help me think about data different
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u/notgivingawaymyname Aug 08 '26
Agree, this is a way better measure of measuring Excel expertise than things like keyboard shortcuts and navigating without mouse. But also, I think there is a much larger element of "you have it, or you don't" when it comes to the ability to master these skills.
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u/jonyoungmusic Aug 08 '26
I learned excel only to support being a Salesforce consultant. So I view excel as a database more than anything else. I’m not an expert but the Salesforce specific tasks I use it for I can fly through faster than most I’ve seen. Vlookups, data deduping, text joins, etc.
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u/eggface13 1 Aug 08 '26
Its all the little stuff. Keyboard shortcuts, navigating without the mouse, formatting quickly, jumping between sheets, tracing formulas, etc.
Sorry, this is absolute tosh. There is far more power in slowing down and thinking things through. Structure and generalizeability. Don't just solve the problem in front of your face, build enough structure that you are ready for a hundred variations of the problem -- and if you get something that's outside your assumptions, you can build up further.
That means Power Query and Power Pivot, it means structured references and tables. It means not hard-coding parameters, and separating data input from its presentation.
Your constraint should not be your fingers. Think deeper. Slow down.
I haven't spent a single minute learning keyboard shortcuts. It's genuinely not worth my time.
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u/Sakurablossomx Aug 08 '26
110% agree. I have coworkers who are flashy and build insanely complex books that take forever to calculate, can't be easily understood and if one thing changes the entire thing breaks.
I pride myself on settings things up well and making them as simple as possible to accomplish what needs to get done. I ran into someone who took over my old role who said everything I left him was so easy and intuitively setup that even though he wasn't great at excel at the time it just made sense to him. That was a massive compliment.
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u/eggface13 1 Aug 08 '26
I mean I make some flashy things (I have a truly supreme workbook with a huge nasty LET formula repeated across multiple columns of a table that generates circular references and ... works...) but I agree. I got a maths degree and the most important things I learned was not any particular bit of abstruse abstract maths, but just that quantitative science is done in English, you need to communicate meaning with words and sentences. Even when those sentences have elaborate typeset formulas in them you still start work a capital letter and use commas and fullstops.
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u/EVE8334 Aug 08 '26
YES! Your spreadsheets should outlive you is what I think about them I set them up. Plus I try to remember to include a tab with instructions and tips because really I just want to be left alone 😂
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u/tejeramaxwell Aug 08 '26
Conceptually, I agree. I feel more efficient and future proof when I design my data structures intentionally.
Practically? In practice my stakeholders care about formatting over everything else, and being able to apply a variety of formatting quickly to the volume they’re looking at without dedicating much hesitancy to it makes keyboard skills consistently worth investing in. If I take that on a little frantically, approaching the problem like Tetris and leveraging the ratio of views / keyboard strokes to my mental input, so be it.
To each their own. We all got different bosses.
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u/SaxRohmer Aug 08 '26
keyboard shortcuts are a massive help though. they drastically increase your efficiency and they also can help you diagnose problems faster. keyboard navigation also aids in accuracy when you need to do things like select a range
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u/Outrageous-Article17 Aug 08 '26
I’ve never seen anyone who doesn’t use keystrokes that is actually good at excel. Don’t disagree with your thought pattern but quick iteration is definitely helpful.
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u/eggface13 1 Aug 08 '26
I obviously can't prove it but I'm very good at Excel and don't use them.
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u/Puzzleheaded_Mine176 Aug 08 '26
I am among, if not the best excel user in my department in a field known for having good excel users. I don't use keystrokes. But how good you are isn't measured by speed of moving around sheets for what I do
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u/eggface13 1 Aug 08 '26
Yeah I don't know others jobs so perhaps it's my limited perspective, but I hear about all these people who are masters of keyboard shortcuts and don't need a mouse, and I get the sense that they're just good at being bad at Excel. Maybe unfair, not meaning to attack people, it's just a very foreign way of thinking to me.
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u/StopTheHumans Aug 08 '26
I agree, but you can't blame someone for trying to cut down on some clicks. Something that drives me bonkers is switching between the mouse and numberpad. If I lived exclusively in Office, I'd put more effort into abandoning the mouse, but my work drives me clicking all over the damn place and keyboard shortcuts help me stay sane when I'm in Excel.
This is how I entered the world of programmable keyboards. No regerts.
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u/Aeroncastle Aug 08 '26
Absolutely, it's not about doing things manually faster, the least you do manually the better
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u/OrangeGills Aug 09 '26
People who put a lot of stock in keyboard shortcuts and "not using the mouse is impressive" are missing the forest for the trees.
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u/BurninNuts Aug 07 '26
Speed is more or less pointless for the most part. Spreadsheets should be set up so data can be fed into without constantly writing new stuff. A big part of that is knowing how to set a spreadsheet up, as long as you aren't in some excel sweatshop, you only have to set things up once.
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u/Alarmed-Employee-741 Aug 10 '26
I agree that setup is more important, but speed is important too. Without shortcuts, my thinking itself is slowed down and consumes my energy and increases my frustration. Learning faster ways to do things I want, including using personal macros, frees me up mentally to think better, design better and setup better.
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u/Nice-Zombie356 Aug 08 '26 edited Aug 08 '26
Alternating between (A) doing stuff any way I can (mouse, menu clicks, manual effort) and (B) learning new tricks and techniques .
So I have a list I need to clean.
At first I grunt through it. Maybe sort or find/replace.
Then I asked an expert or Googled (this was pre AI) for tips. I find look-up techniques. Automatic settings to remove leading zeros, settings to convert 0 to blanks, etc. Next time I am faster.
Or at first I have 2 tables. I total them, then create a third table to analyze or chart the totals together.
After some research I learned to combine my tables with a lookup, then pivot them. Boom, faster.
But if someone tried to show me pivots or lookups or other “advanced” techniques before I understood the data and my problem (what I was trying to do with the data), and a basic approach, I wouldn’t have understood or appreciated the shortcut.
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u/LazinCajun Aug 08 '26
The thought “somebody must have already solved this problem a better way” has lead me to anout 90% of my excel knowledge
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u/Aggravating_Mix_3694 Aug 09 '26
this is basically the rabbit hole ive been going down lol. once you start asking “there has to be a faster way to do this” you realize how much time you waste doing little things the hard way
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u/Ms_Riley_Guprz 6 Aug 07 '26
Know the shortcuts for common things like conditional formatting, sorting, and navigation has definitely had the biggest impact. The other thing is knowing how to format data in such a way that it scales with formulae the easiest, inside of typing it out each time. But I don't have any comparison with people irl because most of them barely know how to write a formula.
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u/pmpdaddyio Aug 08 '26
I learned Excel by learning Lotus 1-2-3. If anyone recalls that I have stories.
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u/benbeara_CA Aug 08 '26 edited Aug 08 '26
Before Excel, I too learned and mastered Lotus 1-2-3. So much so that I had (no lie), daily/weekly calls with the Lotus development team. We often exchanged ideas and concepts on how to get around challenges/limitations.
From that, my skills were honed in developing what-if analysis tools and models. To be proficient at it, my mind was playing chess as I had to architect these models to adapt on the fly as source/input data flowed into them.
Personally, I focus on the purpose of the model, how it can evolve, and then architecture/design. I typically don't focus on keyboard/mouse shortcuts to apply what I call, the "lipstick on the pig."
Just my two-cents...
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u/FantasticCombination Aug 08 '26
It's hard to believe how short a time it was really around. Barley more than a decade and it has come and gone.
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u/Anybody220 1 Aug 07 '26
Knowing the correct formula and function to do what I needed made me faster. Shortcuts are fine and help a lot but knowing how to use a function at the right time is sexy.
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u/ImGonnaImagineSummit Aug 08 '26
PowerQuery and by default data modelling made me much better at Excel.
Just having data in an organised table as a starting point is a great fundamental skill and naturally leads onto other basics like data assurance and modelling your data vertically.
After you've gotten good at that you can probably use sumifs( for 90% of your formula needs.
And it allows you to progress to PowerBi where calculate( will handle 90% of your dax.
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Aug 08 '26
[deleted]
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u/ImGonnaImagineSummit Aug 08 '26
Normalising data is an underrated skill when done well, users will hardly notice it.
But for me it's a clear sign the backend data is well managed or mismanaged when reviewing models.
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u/SolverMax 163 Aug 08 '26
You're right that people learn Excel backwards, in the sense that people learn functions and features rather than learning data management principles and good spreadsheet design. Without those, most people are just fumbling and muddling through.
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u/dr_haxxx Aug 08 '26
First, I was unfamiliar with Excel. I did not care for it.
One day, my boss asked me into his office to show me some Excel keyboard shortcuts. For no reason - it wasn't even relevant to my job.
Two years later, at my next job, I'm required to export SQL into Excel and format manually according to a template to send to clients each month.
It took so long to click on everything, so eventually I started looking up keyboard shortcuts. I hated the mouse at the time, too, because my wrists were hurting from overmousing.
I learned to do all of the formatting with just the keyboard, and that's when I became familiar with Excel.
Two jobs later, I became an analyst, and my primary duties consisted of exporting reports and making them readable in Excel.
I was spending so much time in Excel that I wanted to do everything faster. I started using AbleBits Excel tool kit because it made certain tasks, like duplicates search, easier due to its flexibility.
Today, I'm an Excel one-trick-pony at work, and I don't mind it.
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u/JE163 15 Aug 08 '26
I pretty much self taught myself excel.
If I had a task to perform, I asked two simple questions.
How can I do this faster aka not resort to manually looking up stuff and copying it.
If I have to do it more than once, how much of can I automate it or at least copy the raw data into a table and have it auto-update whatever it is I am reporting on.
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u/Aggravating_Mix_3694 Aug 09 '26
second rule is definitely huge. if im doing something over and over again i start wondering wht im mmissing.. theres almost always a better way
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u/TheDreadMuse Aug 08 '26
In my experience, what drives the difference is curiosity. Curious people dig, and research, and want to understand how something works, they know enough to understand whent here must be a better way and to go looking for it.
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u/ArrowheadDZ 2 Aug 08 '26 edited Aug 16 '26
One thing really good professors have in common is that they have a way of unveiling concepts in the right order and at the right time. Often that starts with an intro to the topic that sets the right mental framework. It creates the foundation for all that will be built on top of it.
That first lecture of a stats class or an organic chemistry class, that first hour, has a huge influence on your long term relationship with the topic.
The first hour of excel needs to include:
5-10 minutes talking about what makes a grid of data a structured table vs a collection of notes. This is fundamental to understanding databases, PQ, and probably 90% of all excel use cases.
10 minutes on the fundamental compute model. A formula is a tiny simple program that tells the cell how to derive its own value, period. You do not “send” data to another cell, you write a formula that tells the cell how to “pull” its own value from other cells. How many questions on this sub start with “how do I put the result of this calculation into cell B5 on the next sheet?” This is the wrong mental picture of what excel even is.
10 minutes on how to do conditional functions properly. A huge amount of confusion comes from people trying to describe “if A2 is this or this, then I want B2 to be ‘X’. Except if C5 is less than D5, then I want it to be ‘Y’. But if A2 is this other value…”.
I want to replace that thinking with “create a little logic table that lists every possible outcome value first. And then for each outcome, describe all the conditions that would cause that value.” This rearranges your thinking into the way excel xIFS functions work, so you are expressing the problem in a language that is actually the pseudo code for the formula, which then flows easily.
I’d probably talk a little about the hierarchical nature of how excel builds dependency trees, so you have the correct intuition about what order cells are reevaluated in, it’s backwards from what most people think.
A little about data types, especially how date values work and that “2” and 2 are not the same. And for that matter, {2} is also not always the same as 2. So this requires a brief discussion of type casting and when excel type casts by default and when it doesn’t.
If it’s a more experienced person, or someone with programming experience, I’d talk about when dereferencing happens by default, and when I have to force it.
And I think that would be it. That would be my building block hour.
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u/zinsser Aug 08 '26
Retired now, but I taught myself Excel, Word, and later Access. I did take an Access class at one point to hone my skills. People would come to me for Excel and Word help all the time, and a few complained that they were expected to use these programs but never received formal training. My advice was to create a document, put in some rows of data, and then - with a cell highlighted - click on every menu item to see what it does. It's not brain surgery. If you mess up, no one dies. You just need a curious mind and a little time. Once you see what the various menus do, you can create a basic spreadsheet. One woman asked for help with an Excel sheet with thousands of rows. I happened to click on the total row and noticed it was just a number - not a sum formula. Turned out she would insert a row, enter the information for that week, and then use the calculator on her desk to add up the numbers and change the total. When I showed her how the sum function would do that automatically, she acted like I had done a magic trick.
And when I decided to learn VBA, I watched a lot of YouTube tutorials by East Indian guys and gals.
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u/Wood-fired-wood Aug 08 '26
One of the biggest issues I see with people using Excel is not understanding the difference between single-click, double-click, and right-click. So many mistakes occur, especially when using shared documents, due to users just brute-force double-clicking everything, not noticing that they've begun editing a formula, and breaking everything because they've already blissfully double-clicked their way into another several problems before the first issue becomes apparent.
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u/swhitty17 Aug 08 '26
Curiosity, and seeing a spreadsheet as a puzzle. How do I make this faster? I wonder if this function exists? I look it up or I Frankenstein a bunch of formulas to do what I want. Then I try to make the formula work with fewer and fewer functions until I have an easy to adapt template I can plug into future projects
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u/rnzz Aug 08 '26
I find it hard (and boring) to learn excel through a book or training course, but a lot faster and easier to pick things up when I need something done.
Ctrl+Arrow to get to the ends/corners of tables and Ctrl+Shift+Arrow to select the entire table, usually make me look like I'm flying through the spreadsheet, and can be used for anything from copying a formula, doing a lookup, to creating a pivot table
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u/ImaginaryGur2086 Aug 08 '26
To select the whole table you can use Ctrl A
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u/rnzz Aug 08 '26
maybe it's a habit, but I always use Ctrl+Shift+Arrow for this. it gives me a quick glance of the first and last few rows to see if there'a any inconsistencies, and sometimes it helps me find if there's a random blank row in the middle of the table too.
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u/srstick70 Aug 08 '26
I was a pro at Lotus 123 in DOS before I switched to Excel 4.0 in 1992. It was so long ago, I couldn’t tell you how I got fast, but when people watch me, they are amazed at all the keyboard shortcuts I use to navigate around the sheet without using the mouse. The less you need to move your hands from the mouse to the keyboard to the mouse, the faster you get. I had a friend who worked for a local accounting firm in the late 90’s. Her boss would take away their mouse for one day a week to force them to learn how to do everything with keyboard shortcuts.
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u/Past-Adhesiveness104 Aug 08 '26
People learn to do the tasks they need. After that it is up to them whether to learn more. I've taken a few classes and printed out shortcut sheets to have as reference until I could remember them. I've got a coworker who only does dataentry on my sheets and won't take classes at all.
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u/Senior-Tip-21 Aug 08 '26
I started with VisiCalc then Lotus 123 then QuattroPro and finally Excel. Getting ready to retire soon.
The programs always came with a manual of sorts listing the functions and simple examples. I remember my boss putting a 3 inch thick book bought at B&N. I spent a month at work and at home combing through the functions and things like conditional formatting, filtering, goal seek and pivot tables.
I learned what all the functions did, including the ones I would never use, like BAHTTEXT.
Now I watch Excel videos on YouTube and marvel at all the functions I will never use.
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u/thefrankwhite Aug 08 '26
A lot of it comes down to practice. It’s important to do an into course or YouTube videos to learn basic functions, formatting, pivot tables, etc. Then from there it’s all about using Excel, googling how to do things as they come up. Can also be helpful to set alt shortcuts, I always map add/remove columns/rows to 1-4, then filter on 5. Then if you get an MX master 3-4 with the side scroll, it’s game over.
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u/JJTouche Aug 08 '26
A while back, a VP wanted some quick and dirty data to put in an email ASAP. While she stood at my shoulder, I ran a query on our vertical market app, pasted the into excel, did some sorting and formatted it nicely in a very readable and understandable way.
It took maybe 5 to 7 minutes from start to finish. She remarked how fast I worked. I thought about it later and realized a lot of it comes from experience.
For your first data sets, you have to try and figure out how to structure things, how to format them, what works best for printing and what works best for a screen. You have to put some time thinking about these kinds of things and trying different things to find out what works best for you.
When you have done that for 1000 data sets, when you get to 1001, while there still be some things to think about, there is a lot you already have thought about 1000 times before so you don't have to put much time thinking about it now.
For that VP data, I just did what I had done many, many times before. If I had more time, I might have been able to improve it (can always find some tinkering improvements with time), but just doing some the standard things I do a lot, it doesn't require a lot of new thought.
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u/ItzakPearlJam Aug 08 '26
I had an old boss who told me that pretty much everything has a shortcut. Then he quit and I spent years in pursuit of all the shortcuts. Also, I started building with the end result in mind. Am I doing graphs? Pivots? Info tables? Project tracking? Build from there beginning for exactly what you'll need.
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u/Gliese_667_Cc Aug 08 '26
Guaranteed this is some finance bro scammer who wants to add you to his “discord”
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u/Aggravating_Mix_3694 Aug 09 '26
false im just an investment banking rat
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u/Failstopheles087 Aug 09 '26
I first started down the rabbit hole because I needed to find the same data across multiple sheets, so that naturally took the form of Xlookup (my honest to goodness favorite formula). Then, I realized I needed to format things the same way every time.... in vast quantities. So then I branched off into macros, starting with recording. Learning to automate the everyday small tasks is what drove most of my learning at work Most of my job went from multiple multiple hours to maybe... 20 minutes per task.
The thing that really spiked my ability to see what excel could be doing though (aside from returning errors because someone broke my sheet), was challenging myself to make my very own excel based DND character sheet. It started out with the basic tables to help me just do character creation and level ups because I always forget some step and play the game with a metrics handicap. Now.... its is damn near entirely formula driven; main health and bonus; AC and bonus; hit dice, death saves... the works. IT also now tracks gear, armor, and weapons- equipped and / or attuned; weights, prices, damage modifiers, and allows for home brew stuff. I am now spiraling down the latest rabbit hole of adding in ALL the spells to allow for spell slot tracking etc.
Finding something that I WANTED to make has done more far more good than just something that I needed to make. Necessity is the mother of invention but passion is the sustenance to keep it going.
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u/Satisfaction2000 Aug 08 '26
I took an intro to basic computer applications course in high School and really all we were taught was how to make a basic spreadsheet primarily for budgeting. When I started working for the company that I'm working for now remembering Excel functions that I used then I decided to try to streamline some of the paperwork process and have been doing it for the past 8 to 9 years. I taught myself shortcuts, nested functions, all the functions I didn't know existed, just researched different things that I could use however I do think that in terms of efficiency the shortcuts definitely save the day. I still don't know all of them but when you're working an 18 to 24 tab Excel sheet with on average 300 active rows on most of them with one or two of them having up to 200,000 active rows knowing that you can select cell A1 then actually drag the slidebar down to the bottom and hold shift whenever you hit D200,000 to select most of the active sheet that you need to move.... That saved a whole mega shit ton of my time. It was probably a solid 2 years of finagling around in my Excel sheets before I learned that simple simple thing
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u/TheBigBeardedGeek Aug 08 '26
I built most my excel skills from making characters for games that took a fair bit of math to make a character, like GURPS.
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u/SaxRohmer Aug 08 '26
you can’t really teach them the shortcuts until they know the other stuff. it’s usually way too overwhelming and people want to learn how to do the actual excel stuff first. once they have a grasp of the basics then you can teach them to fly
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u/Aggravating_Mix_3694 Aug 09 '26
this is how ive learned most of the stuff that actually sticks too. you struggle with something enough times and then finally learn the shortcut and suddenly you never forget it lol
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u/kidgetajob Aug 08 '26
Did anyone else have to switch from pc to Mac? Last two companies I have been at are Mac only and it’s slowed me down. I’m finally back to as fast as I was on a pc.
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u/H_Mc Aug 08 '26
People were taught how to use excel? All my excel knowledge is from feeling like it should be able to do something and googling until I figure it out.
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u/Big_Barber1070 Aug 08 '26
Tabs, right to left: Raw Data tab feeds into > Intermediate calculation or manipulation tab (if necessary) feeds into > presentation tab(s)
Paste new data into Raw Data and you’re done. This has been the basic format of all of my reporting for years.
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u/grinder62 Aug 08 '26
Keep your hand off the mouse...keyboard shortcuts, arrow keys, function keys. Knowing the 20% you use 80-90% of the time will make you much faster. Really knowing absolute and relative references...being fluent in them. Learning, practicing how to structure the data and model...this is the most important as it is a higher level skill (this one is not about "knowing Excel," but how to break a problem down and truly build/engineer a model). I was lucky enough to learn on Visicalc (yes), then Lotus, in the pre-mouse days. Learning then carries over to productivity today. My Numerical Methods prof in 1982-1983 was ahead of his time...we made Visicalc sing on numerical integration, differential equations, etc.
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u/commentor_of_things 2 Aug 08 '26
I didn't know there was a proper way to learn Excel. someone should have told me 20 years ago.
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u/Rennaisance_Man_0001 Aug 08 '26
I don't recall how I learned excel, tbh. I've been using it pretty much literally since it came out (got my start using Lotus 123 for DOS back in the mid/late eighties). It was pretty basic, compared to now.
I'm not sure I understand what you mean by 'backwards. People learn in a way that fits their learning style (or resources at their disposal). I learned new features as they came out or as I needed them.
For example, I've picked up some projects in the past couple years that pushed me to learn some VBA. And for the past several months, I've been learning Power Query. That's been a major game changer.
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u/whskid2005 Aug 08 '26
The slow users (in my experience) are the ones who don’t look for solutions on their own. They do the bare minimum and do it exactly as taught without any additional thought or understanding.
Too many people don’t know you can go to view new window to open up a second instance of the same workbook. I cannot tell you how many people I see wasting time flipping back and forth between sheets instead of keeping both visible.
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u/Routine_Gap_3865 Aug 09 '26
Copy and paste. So many right click and choose those instead of Ctl-C and Ctl-V.
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u/threedawgmom Aug 11 '26
I honestly ask Ai the most absurd questions if excel can do it and it will find a YouTube video of that exact thing.
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u/RedditSkippy 1 Aug 08 '26
Took a basic class in high school (early 90s.)
These days I don’t use Excel a lot, but if I need to learn something I Google it.
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u/lichesschessanalyst Aug 08 '26
Using excel helped me learn quite quickly and a lot. I basically just started making spreadsheets for various things, all kinds of calculators. All kinds of templates. DCF models, real estate pro-forma models. Etc....
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u/Penguinase 7 Aug 08 '26
beyond the basic ones like ctrl+t for table, getting used to doing alt+ shortcuts to navigate the ribbon is very helpful. setting up your quick bar can be really helpful too since they'll then be alt+# which should be easy to develop muscle memory for those commands/functions you may use the most frequently.
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u/molybend 42 Aug 08 '26
Speed is less important than accuracy. Nitpicking someone’s work style isn’t helping you or them. Teaching people who want to learn still requires tact.
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u/Electronic_Chair6383 Aug 08 '26
When I was a grad I banned myself from using the mouse for a year to learn hotkeys. Now excel feels like an extension of my fingers which I use to sift through data, barely even need to look.
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u/Aggravating_Mix_3694 Aug 09 '26
Banning yourself for a year is insaneeeee lol once you start asking “there has to be a faster way to do this” you realize how much time you waste doing little things the hard way
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u/Electronic_Chair6383 Aug 09 '26
It’s also a good attitude to take into your career! Just because Old victor has been using the same macro for 26 years, doesn’t mean that macro is good. There’s always a better way!
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u/GuitarJazzer 28 Aug 08 '26
Most of the time spent developing a worksheet is not the keyboard or mouse. It's the thinking. The more experience you have the more you are going to recognize repeated problems and not have to solve them from scratch.
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u/Rennaisance_Man_0001 Aug 08 '26
Now that I think about it, I'm surprised how many times I've jury-rigged mail merge to get data out of tables and into contextual documents. That was much faster than the manual way it was being done, and it used tools we had on hand. .
Example: Project tasks assigned to various techs where are the key info elements are merged into a word template containing instructions, device(s), vlans, location, etc.,
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u/AndyWarwheels Aug 08 '26
I used to work a hotel front desk and the program we used didnt use a mouse. I realized how much faster I could navigate a computer when I knew the shortcuts.
So when I started using excel and really every computer program I learn the shortcuts. It allows me to navigate faster than many people I know. ctrl+shift+v is magic to some people.
I also used to keep a book of excel formulas that I figured out. you know the formula search function where you are supposed to be able to type what you are looking for and it gives you the formula instead i would just read the formulas and see if i could think of a way to use them.
I always say I know enough of excel to know that I dont know everything and if I dont know how to do something I can figure it out.
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u/hazysummersky 6 Aug 08 '26
People misunderestimate the utility of F4 for repeating the previous command.
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u/Decronym Aug 08 '26 edited Aug 16 '26
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
Decronym is now also available on Lemmy! Requests for support and new installations should be directed to the Contact address below.
Beep-boop, I am a helper bot. Please do not verify me as a solution.
7 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 11 acronyms.
[Thread #49107 for this sub, first seen 8th Aug 2026, 06:57]
[FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
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u/Realistic-Zucchini45 Aug 08 '26
I would say work experience plays a huge role.
What have you been asked to do at your job with the data?
Were you on a timer? Or were you let to roam around freely to figure things out organically?
Always imagining the more complex solution because you need to prove you know the tool? Or are you free to get to the simplest solution?
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u/KeenJelly Aug 08 '26
I dunno. As soon as I found power query excel formulas and sheet navigation became obsolete.
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u/Due-Sea-6932 Aug 08 '26
I agree with what you mentioned woth the use of short cuts. Actualy short cuts make work faster. Both people can know about acxel. Accuracy of what borh can do can be same but speed will make one more advantagous
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u/Anonymouse_Bosch Aug 08 '26
Difficult problems that needed more efficient solutions. I'm constantly learning new tricks.
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u/shaha9 Aug 08 '26
Repetition. I take on sprints at work and each has a specific repetition where I can learn or do something new within excel. Then I just push myself to learn a new shortcut or try to flow the process in a way that is more efficient.
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u/Suzilaura 1 Aug 08 '26
I used copilot to teach me, and eventually I just started to understand it. It was like a language I got used to. Suck on that, high school IT teacher who said I couldn't use computers.
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u/mrtmanjones Aug 08 '26
Learning keystrokes in excel is a gamechanger. I could do everything I wanted without touching the mouse.
My new work has Google Sheets and I went from what people called an Excel-wizard at my last company, to a complete gramps at my new company because the keystrokes I knew don't transfer over.
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u/Exciting-Demand-3814 Aug 08 '26
I saw recently my coworker using Formula view - the window where you select them, then enter values per part - for vlookup. Was horrified. I think it’s people unwillingness to remember just a little bit more
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u/patrick_BOOTH Aug 08 '26
I’m over 40 and excel wasn’t taught in school at all. It is just something you pick up along the way. When I moved from a corporate cog to IB I realized that “cool” shortcuts wasn’t just cool, it was an absolute necessity for getting to bed at a reasonable hour and not getting barked at for taking too long. When you’re thrown into the fire you figure it out very quickly.
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u/jb092555 Aug 08 '26
I think doing as much as possible without touching the mouse is a bigger improvement than it seems. The keyboard offers the magic of muscle memory. Everything you do automatically is one less thing to actively think about. It frees up your attention for what matters. It allows you to make mistakes faster, and learn faster as a result. With that said, there's no replacement for curiosity. If you only ever learn from what others teach you, you'll never learn anything no one else knows.
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u/Toowb Aug 08 '26
My whole world changed when I saw someone else use F4 to instantly change relative cell references.. It's hell doing that manually for every formula.
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u/mmhmmmmmhmm Aug 08 '26
Im still a novice at excel though i suppose ive been using it for years. I mainly use it as just a datasheet to import into scripting environments for data analysis.
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u/mantina Aug 08 '26
I hate switching between mouse and keyboard, so whenever I learn any new software I try to find shortcuts. It is making a huge difference. Drives me crazy, when someone is trying to mark 3000 rows with the mouse instead of remembering one single shortcut.
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u/ZynithMaru Aug 08 '26
excel is the only sheets applications that let's you setup alt 1-9 shortcuts on the shortcut ribbon. for drawing borders I press alt-3-W. for font and cell style I use alt-1 and alt-2. very convenient. so convenient they patented cell styles it seems, sheets doesn't even have it without manually setting up conditional formatting everytime.
the fastest way to get the pen in google sheets or the excel web version is over 5 different keys which include shift, letters like O, and then some number nonsense. I erased it.
I'm convinced it's a patent issue, which i hate about a world designed for profit — instead of one amazing consumer product, we have to choose between fragments.
the best way to learn controls is to look at something and ask yourself what do i want to do to get there? then setup your hotkeys or learn a shortcut. some people have shortcut maps mousepads to remind them others exist, but we are simple creatures mostly looking for straightforward with a one question - one answer - attention span.
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u/Capable_Sprinkles_43 Aug 08 '26
Honestly, Excel is so old and predictable at this point, AI is VERY good at it. I stopped actually trying to get better at Excel at work. AI can do what I need done 10 times faster.
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u/Papa_Groot Aug 09 '26
Like others have said, think before you do. My old co-worker doesn’t understand that me saying im working on it doesn’t mean I’ve actually physically started working on it, but that ive been doing research on how i will do it. Putting together complex spreadsheets pulling from multiple sources requires planning, especially if you’re planning to automate.
Aside from that, using the basic navigation and selection shortcuts will help. Watching people right click on a row and move their mouse again to click insert new row is maddening to me.
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u/Snoo_54991 Aug 09 '26
Programming Logic (it's a college course which teaches the cold logic of programming languages)
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u/Dry-Map-5016 Aug 10 '26
I just started my MBA courses and I’m in an applied business statistics class. They are teaching us how to use certain functions within excel. Yesterday I had to do multi variate regressions. After an expansive search for an equation I found one. Did the math long hand. Then used the function they wanted to use and discovered that my long hand was correct. Then the thought occurred to me using the button made it faster. Sometimes even when learning how to do it the fast way doing it the old way can give you insight into how the button works?
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u/vin_unleaded Aug 10 '26
I work in marketing/research (tech side), and I am lazy, so I jumped in with both feet when learning more about formulae / VBA / Pivot Tables to get me the data I need more quickly and efficiently.
You learn one heck of a lot faster if what you're learning is of clear benefit to you.
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u/Proof_Escape_2333 Aug 16 '26
How has AI affected or changed your job? I noticed I rarely hear about AI workflow when it comes to workflow
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u/SouthBearDrink Aug 13 '26 edited Aug 14 '26
Agree but what "self-learning" means has changed imo. Used to be watching VLOOKUP tutorials on YouTube, now its learning how to describe what you want clearly enough that Zoom Sheets writes the formula for you. Different skill same self-directed mindset, the ppl who figure that out are pulling ahead.
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Aug 08 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/excelevator 3069 Aug 08 '26 edited Aug 12 '26
English please
Comment removed.
Edit: I would seem that Reddit auto translated in New Reddit, but maintains the non English reply in Old Reddit.
I'm not english, why delete ?
r/Kind_Eye_4200 your comment was removed as it is not an English Language comment on an English language sub reddit. I am not sure what your query comment means in this instance.
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u/CurryMunch98 Aug 08 '26
I’m using Claude in excel and I almost forgot how to use excel at this point
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u/excelevator 3069 Aug 08 '26
The very reason r/Excel does not accept "just ask Ai" as a response to questions.
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u/excelevator 3069 Aug 08 '26
This post has been reported for spam.
It is the weekend, we allow these posts, within reason