each should excel in
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The past 10 years have seen a wave of innovative big data software designed to analyze, manipulate, and visualize data. Yet for the regular knowledge worker, Microsoft Excel, 30 years on, remains the go-to product for people looking to make sense of data. Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s CEO, maintains that Excel is still the one Microsoft product that stands above the rest — and 750 million knowledge workers worldwide support that claim every day.
We’ve been teaching and testing Microsoft Excel for a decade, and a survey of several hundred office staff we ran suggests we spend more than 10% of our working lives spreadsheeting, and for those working in research and development or finance, it’s more like 30%, or 2.5 hours a day.
Imagine, then, if this substantial proportion of the global workforce were a little better at using the application. Time would be saved, and productivity would improve.
Last year we put together The Definitive 100 Most Useful Excel Tips, for which we consulted Excel experts and looked at tens of thousands of test results and course usage data. Though every Excel feature has a use case, no single person uses every Excel feature themselves. Cut through the 500+ functions, and you’re left with 100 or so truly useful functions and features for the majority of modern knowledge workers. We’ve selected ten from that list which are especially easy to learn (approximately 2 hours total) and which can make a material difference to productivity. These ten are listed in decreasing order of utility from our top 100 list. If, like many, you’re stuck on what to learn next in Excel, you might want to look at this 2×2 matrix, which factors in usefulness and time needed to learn a skill.