Day 37 of 100 Days of Growth: The Secret Weapon in Consulting: Excel Skills ??

I’ve always had a bit of a soft spot for Excel spreadsheets. There’s something incredibly satisfying about formulas and the repetitive patterns they create. I love Excel so much that I even got an award for it recently!

Fun fact: During my Chemical Engineering degree, I actually wrote an Excel macro as my graduation thesis. It was a chemical properties calculator, and yes, it was as nerdy as it sounds! ??

As consultants, Excel is more than just a tool — it’s a skill that can make or break our work. From building massive multi-parameter calculators to creating filterable, sortable tables for data analysis, Excel is crucial for everything from tracking finances to drilling down to explore a cluster analysis of multi-key objects.

Fun fact 2: I started my journey with spreadsheets back in the days of Lotus 1-2-3 on DOS (along with dBase and WordPerfect). I know, that kind of exposes my age... but hey, those were the early days of my love for data!

Thanks to some fantastic mentors this week — Greg Janky , Erik Kronborg Sharon Cooper Shu Shan (Susan) Lee and Chris Khaw — I’ve had extra time to sharpen my Excel and numbers (non-Excel) skills. Ongoing learning is key, and there’s always more to explore in the world of spreadsheets and number crunching.

Finally, Fun (and sad) fact 3: It kills me when I see people using Excel as a text table to type words in grids, or—worse—using tables in MS Word for number listings without formulas. ??

Cheers to embracing the grid, one formula at a time! ??