Has your Excel knowledge helped your career?

[Patience]

Yeah - you certainly need to know how to appy it to your current situation. Otherwise there is no point, really.

Last October I decided I was some what bored with my job (I work in Charity Finance) soI decided to start looking around. I had been the Excel Guru of the office (and used to think I knew a lot till I can here with a query!) and had set up some nice systems to make their work far more efficient. Unfortunately I got the impression that a lot of what I had done wasn't really going to get used, as I think some people didn't really see that there was ever an issue with taking several days to produce a report that I could do in 10 minutes.

So I went for a new job and was delighted when part of the interview was an excel test. I was also delighted when it was relatively difficult, and not just "Open a new workbook and sum a column." I totally screwed up the actual interview part, but I got a call back on the strength of my Excel alone Second time round in interview I was far more relaxed and I got the job.

So the long and the short of it is - yes Excel has helped my career!

 

[Haris80cr]

It has helped me in every job that i have done so far.
- Barman (yes indeed),
- stock brocker (of course),
- Employee in a tourist office (cutting employees' job in half with a simple macro),
- the bank i work for (not yet though because i need some help from you in order to solve one last problem)

 

[Big Monkey]

I'm in the market for a new gig right now, but I'm not finding anything that looks interesting.

I want to put what I've learned to good use, but the only thing I find remotely relative to Excel is all dealing with the finance industry and/or requires experience with forecasting and such.

I hope something comes up soon.

 

[Lewiy]

I'm in the market for a new gig right now, but I'm not finding anything that looks interesting.

I want to put what I've learned to good use, but the only thing I find remotely relative to Excel is all dealing with the finance industry and/or requires experience with forecasting and such.

I hope something comes up soon.

I would say that anything whih involves databases of any sort (pretty much any industry) can involve Excel in some way or another, they just probably don't know it yet.

 

[KenCriss]

I just won a Client Service award from my company largely for some Excel applications that I have written for my team over the last year.

I can say without a doubt that without the help from my friends here at Mr. Excel, I would have only a fraction of the knowledge that I have now (and I would not have won the award). This is by far the best message board I have ever been associated with.

I am still trying to get better at the "giving back" part by helping other blokes out.

Learning VBA has helped my career immensely.

 

[colmmc]

Yes, excel has certainly helped my career.

I am the most proficient user of Excel in my company of avoer 60 people. I've got jobs because I was able to clean data using excel, create soft version of routing sheets, revolutionise what is done with back end raw data, create reports etc. I was the lead data analyst in creating Master Data for upload into SAP.

I am still useless with VBA - I've got VBA for Dummies but still find it difficult.

Maybe an evening course would help.

Colm

 

[colmmc]

Definitely. It gave me a new career -- moved from working in science to working as an Excel consultant.

Common link? I love to solve problems. Both careers give me that, but the consulting pays better.

Denis

I want to become a consultant. I love data problem solving.

 

[Zack Barresse]

I would say yes, it has helped my career. Do I consult full-time? No, absolutely not. I love doing it on the side and I don't want to do it full-time. I see it more as a hobby of mine, and I don't want to overuse a hobby and make it something that I don't enjoy. But overall, yes it's helped greatly. Sadly, most people I know equate "good at Excel" to "good with computers" and I end up looking at networking stuff (or the like). LOL!

 

[VoG]

It hasn't advanced my career as such (I don't think so anyway). I work for an R&D company in which I specialise in drinking water chemistry and treatment. I've used Excel for years for analysing and presenting experimental data. A few years ago I came up with an idea for a pretty big water chemistry model in Excel - very shortly after we produced our proposal and clients started signing-up I realised that I could not do what I wanted without code. This led to an extremely steep self-taught learning curve and ultimately a successful project (but when I look at some of the code now I cringe).

In my company I'm now usually the person of choice to work on projects involving Excel (especially involving VBA). Unfortunately this is not that often and, like Richard, most of my involvement with Excel is related to this board (and a couple of other general computing boards).

 

[Michael M]

I started with Excel by asking our IT guy how to add 2 cells together. Then I was hooked !!
I now take great delight in providing other users with workbooks that "Can't be done in Excel" OR "Excel can't do that"
I never cease to be amazed by what CAN be done with Excel.
I have noticed that I too, have become the house "Guru".
I might add, that without this forum, I would still be trying to add those 2 cells together.

Power to all and thank you.
Michael M