I’ve been in the work force for 4 years or so now and I’m in a finance gig. It’s very Excel heavy. I’m a giant nerd when it comes to learning shortcuts/being efficient when I do things so when I realized I was going to be using Excel a lot, I put quite a bit of time into getting really damn good at it.
I was expecting it to help me build whatever I needed easily in Excel. What I wasn’t expecting was how much being good at Excel would allow me to not work as much.
Here’s an example of something that happened last week: there is a spreadsheet that basically tracks our inventory for “parts”. This spreadsheet was taking my coworker who was doing it manually several hours every week to complete. It was passed down to me about 3 weeks ago. With what I know about Excel and some Google-fu to code a macro, I have it down to about 5 minutes a week. So I’m expected to take 3-4 hours but it takes me 5 minutes.
This is just one example but learning a bit about Excel and VBA (just enough to where you can Google through building a macro) will save you so much time.