Knowledge Snippet

“ALT + Enter! Look, it has shifted to a new line , it looks good now. Learn some small techniques like these and then see, your report will look better.” That was my boss, my mentor, Pallavi mam, back then in 2002. I learnt many techniques later to make my MS Excel report look gorgeous.

Well, I used to use Excel before that. I’ve even used Excel macros/ VBA codes or written a few myself for extracting the data and bringing it in some format. But I’ve hardly used reports with texts before, it was more of graphs or numbers that I encountered with. Later in my career with IDeaS, (now a SAS company) I became proficient with Excel. After almost five years with Excel, I shifted to SAS, and Excel remained only to enter attendance sheets which I would then read into SAS to make my automated “Training Drainage” reports. Few years passed by without much of it…until I was out of SAS completely, with no or hardly any access to the best analytics software in the world.

In the meantime, I started helping corporates to transition to R or Python for complex tasks. But still when it came to quick and dirty analysis, it was Excel that came handy. With the newer versions of Microsoft Excel and power pivot stuff, my initial exploration was through. Then I moved to more sophisticated software like Power BI or programming in R or Python.

I believe tools are means to take you to the destination. If you don’t know the route to your destination, no tools can help you. So focus on acquiring aptitude to analyze the data. Once you have the right aptitude and approach in place, you can use any tool to reach your goal. It is like learning to drive well, once you have that skill in place, you can drive any car.

Agree?