8 strategies I used to learn & master Excel in a short time

so you want to learn excel quickly in this video i am going to share eight techniques that worked really well for me when i had to learn excel power bi or any other technical software fairly quickly number one pick a problem and solve it whenever we have to learn something deeply technical or complex we tend to feel overwhelmed and look all over the place what works best for me and many others is focusing instead on a single small problem to give you that initial confidence boost so for example recently when i started working with one of the government ministries here in new zealand i had to learn how the tech one accounting and payroll software works and this is what i did instead of getting like a huge knowledge transfer from a colleague or going through the documentation or a bunch of videos i focused on a single small problem of how do i extract employee data from the system and then once i understood that then i went back for more that is what you should also do when you are trying to learn excel quickly instead of looking all over the place just focus on a small single problem and learn how to solve that with excel the second technique is go wide before going deep in rugby there is a saying that you need to either go wide or go deep but when it comes to learning complex software or technologies what works best is going wide before going deep so how can we apply this go wide before going deep to excel excel has many features and what will work best for you is having a high level understanding of all the key features of excel that is formulas pivot tables data management through power query using tables and using charts and a little bit of automation so once you understand all of these features at a high level at a wide view then you need to pick the areas that are more appropriate for your immediate needs and then go deep into them so maybe for an upcoming project you need to build a lot of pivot reports then you need to go in depth into the pivot tables but what could happen is if you directly jump into the deep end without understanding all the wider aspects of excel is you will miss out on some of the obvious wins or easy ways to do things a good example could be you might actually learn how to do a very complex forecasting model using some of the advanced analysis formulas and whatnot but if you do not understand the wider picture you will obviously miss out that there is actually a forecast data button right in excel so it is always useful to understand at a high level first before jumping deep into one of the areas the third technique that works best when it comes to learning is connecting the dots this is the idea of incremental learning every new idea that you are learning in excel try to connect it with the ideas that you already know for example let's say at the start of excel you learn how to use formulas later on you learn how to use conditional formatting at that point these two features are in their own silos but if you learn how to connect this and that and figure out that you could write formulas to drive your conditional formatting that will solidify your understanding of both formulas and conditional formatting and we will remember better when we are able to connect individual concepts using some sort of connection the fourth technique for learning is having a play with excel but how do you play with excel you could for example download some data from online and use that to kind of go wild and make an interesting chart or maybe a model or whatever else that you fancy you could for example if you're learning vba instead of using vba to automate some of your work maybe create a small game in the spreadsheet so that you can understand how various interaction elements and the events and other things can work you could also take some of the boring or repetitive aspects of your work and try to automate them and then see how soon you're able to get there using various excel features you could even challenge yourself to write a completely different formula to solve the same problem all of these are kind of creative fun ways to engage the engage your mind and think outside the box when it comes to learning and when you do this you will enjoy the learning process more and you will tend to remember and reuse those concepts later on the fifth approach that works best is to stop worrying about small details you could for example spend hours and days and weeks worrying about whether to use vlookup or index match whether to use power query or vba whether to use pivot tables or formulas and all of those my new you know very specific things instead when you are learning you should focus to really collect all the ideas right don't feel loyalty towards this or that just gather the ideas that work best for you once you gather enough information and once you start practicing then you would be able to kind of forge your own pathway and build something that works best for you the sixth technique for learning is share what you learn you might be thinking hey i'm still learning what am i supposed to share but this is what really works best for many of us i remember one specific experience from my school days i used to be fairly good in science and mathematics and at one point our biology teacher had to go on a really long leave and we were left with having no biology teacher for almost a school term so my principal asked if anybody volunteered to teach biology for that particular school term and i kind of put up my hand saying yes i will do that i know it was challenging but i really enjoyed and it kind of forced me to learn a little more become confident in the subject and teach it to other kids so that is what sharing information does to us when we are asked to share some information we will prepare better we will memorize things better and we will also think more on how do i make it simple and easy for others to understand and in that process we tend to understand things better as well so if you really want to master something you need to teach it now i'm not recommending that we all go out and start our own youtube channels or blogs or forums or whatever instead try to help out a colleague or maybe start an informal group in your workplace wherein you all share the knowledge and this works really well for you you know it might sound like an altruistic thing but there is actually a greater benefit to you as well that you will be you will become better in the technology the seventh technique that works best when it comes to learning is reflecting and revising you might remember from school days that throughout the school year you would learn lots of things but when it comes to the exam time there would be a period of time wherein we will be just revising the concepts that we learned throughout the year same thing applies for technology as well you might learn a lot of different little things through youtube or books or blog articles or other sources but there is no point just learning without having time to reflect and revise those ideas so after you learn one or two key techniques go back and see how that can be applied to your work there are two types of things that you need to do here one is active reflection when you are actually doing and reflecting on how this particular technique of conditional formatting for example would work in your in your business but there is also passive reflecting this is when you kind of passively think about the specific technique or idea that you just learned while doing something else maybe taking your dog for a walk or when you're cooking or whatever else so this way you you are giving that idea a little bit time to kind of marinate in your brain before you go and implement something new or powerful in your work the last technique is knock out the hedge many times we try to kind of think um i don't really know this that well should i really go and use it or maybe i need more information for me to master this and that kind of hesitation is what stops us from really understanding and using any technology so don't feel that hesitation instead just go and do it the way i think of this is take the chandu and remove the hedge from it so you can do awesome things in your work now there is a ninth technique that works very well when it comes to learning excel which is to go for an online course as some of you may know i run an online excel course called excel school in that program i teach all aspects of excel right from data preparation with power query to understanding and analyzing data with formulas and pivot tables making charts advanced charts and preparing business dashboards this course is really power packed with more than 24 hours of video content and it is delivered completely online so whenever you have some free time you can go in watch one or two lessons take the ideas and practice there is practice problems and example files throughout the course for you if you want to know more information about the course and give it a go please check the link that is shown on the screen and if you are looking for a quick way to analyze your data and understand how excel pivot tables work check out my video on the pivot tables that is linked on the screen i wish you all the best in with your extra learning journey bye bye

Channel: Chandoo

Views: 366,903

Keywords: chandoo, chandoo.org, Excel, spreadsheets, how to learn excel quickly, what are the steps to learn data analytics, learn microsoft excel, mindset needed for learning Excel quickly

Id: K0UF-nSc_Mw

Length: 10min 13sec (613 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 17 2021