How do you get good with Excel?

As an Excel MVP I’m often asked:

Question: What’s the best way to get good at Excel?

My Answer: Use Excel to solve a wide variety of problems that push you to explore different areas of Excel and see lots of different needs around data.

I believe so strongly in the value of real-world Excel practice that I developed a weekly series on LinkedIn Learning. Excel Weekly Challenge serves up everyday problems designed to make people think and use the many facets of Excel in an integrated manner. No stand-alone tips and tricks.

I developed this series with two different audiences in mind:

1. Those who are pretty comfortable with Excel and welcome regular challenges.
2. Those who may not be so savvy but want to know more about what’s possible in Excel. For this audience, you can watch the challenge, then learn from watching my solution.

The key here is using true real-world challenges. I base each week’s challenge on real problems that I've encountered in my own work; work with clients; posts in excel forums; and things students bring up in classes. Like:

• Troubleshooting and correcting payroll mistakes
• Cleaning up sloppy worksheet layout
• Preparing messy data for inventory analysis
• Generating summaries
• Limiting inputs to acceptable values

Sometimes an Excel formula can be the answer. Other times, we just need to do a little formatting to make our data more readable. Occasionally, in the series, we’ll troubleshoot something and realize that it just can’t be fixed. Even when it can’t be fixed, we learn more about Excel and what it means to work with data.

You'll see so much of Excel: Formulas, Power Query, Pivot Tables, images and shapes, configuring the Excel environment ... EVERYTHING!

The LinkedIn Content team suggested I publish a newsletter to go along with each Weekly Challenge, to enhance each Excel challenge. I hope you’ll subscribe to this newsletter and follow along with me each week. If you can give me just a few minutes each week, your Excel skills will improve and the people who rely on your Excel skills will be happier.

I welcome your ideas and questions in the comments section below. Now, let’s get to the first challenge!

This Week's Challenge: Change chart type and create summary

In this week’s video, we're starting with a clumsy pie chart that someone else made. The objectives:

• Modify the chart to make it useful.
• Create a summary of the types of calls represented in the source data.

Where you can find me

For training and consulting, contact me via my website

Watch my courses on LinkedIn Learning

Follow me on LinkedIn