What is (or should be) considered "advanced" knowledge in Excel?

[arkusM]

. It's about how good can you make others?

That why you (and many like you ) have thousands of posts and why this board is such a great place to be.

 

[JazzSP8]

The kind that test my patience the best is people who have an Excel workbook full of numbers in front of them and open up calculator to do calculations!

I've recently seen this...

She was working out a 10% rise on some figures on about 1000 lines of data, she did it all, with a calculator, reading numbers from Excel, punching them in and then entering the number from the calculator into a cell... Scary...

Apparantly it took her hours to complete...

 

[arkusM]

Reflecting a bit it seems that people are the collateral damage of our technology lust. People who buy advance DSLR's to use as a point-n-shoot cameras; not taking advantage of the power in their hands. People who have latest gen "cell" phone who complain that the battery sucks; when they are hold a device that really is a handheld computer that happens to also make phone calls. People who use Excel that could do what they need with a piece of paper and calculator unaware of the powerful tool it is. People who drive cars that are wonders of engineering and manufacture that drive them solely as put-put grocery-getters... the list goes on. The choices are staggering and most often far exceed our requirments.

I guess we can't, or choose not too, keep up with the power that surrounds us for whatever reason. I (we) need to be patient (and humble) grasshopper - right?

 

[Greg Truby]

I'd also say to keep in mind that your question is really like asking that same question about any other subject matter.

"How many "strong" people are in the gym?"
"How many "good communicators" are in the office?"

The majority of people will tend to believe themselves on the top half (or quartile) of just about any curve. If you can bench press 200 lbs and dead lift 300, you think that's pretty strong. But if you can bench press 300 lbs and dead lift 500, you think that's reasonably strong. However, if you can do 400 & 650 then you think that's strong.

Likewise most folks consider themselves pretty good communicators and some think that if their grammar and punctuation are correct, they're well above average. Others would say that because they consider how their message will be received and what is the objective, they're well above average. Others would say that because they consider the media, the sender's objectives, and not only the target audience's reaction but how the message or issue will impact the target's objectives and goals and they then practice and hone the message making rough drafts and revisions to written communiques or video taping and rehearsing their speech, then that makes them above average.

Ask the strength question on a site that caters to bodybuilders or power lifting competitors and the standards will be well thought out and "expert" will be pretty demanding.

Ask the communications question on a site dedicated to professional speaking or sales craft and it'll be likewise.

You've posed your question in a forum of hard-core Excel users - so our standard for "expert" is going to be fairly rigorous.

Keep that in mind when judging others' Excel expertise and in weighing responses from our gang here.

 

[JamesW]

It's incredibly hard to label someone based on their skillset as it is so subjective.

What about 'the bar'?

"Joe Bloggs in my eyes is an Excel expert".

Sid Smith arrives in the company and knows twice as much as Joe

"Woah! Sid Smith is better than Joe, so he must be a Guru"

Ben Twilly arrives in the company and knows twice as much as Sid.

"Ben knows more than Sid?! My God, he's an Excel Genius!"

etc. etc.

That's why I couldn't get 100% on my A-Level IT exam

 

[Norie]

I'm not sure about the iidea of doing something in a way that you know works, and is perhaps is more efficient, but other people don't understand.

 

[MrKowz]

Good points, Greg and James; that is the reason I asked this excel question on a board with some of the highest experienced excelers out there. This is merely one of my little threads I like to make to encourage users to openly participate in good natured discussion. And I agree, this is a highly subjective topic, and it is always nice to have a better understanding from many points of view (from novice to expert) imo.

 

[diddi]

Its amusing to read other people's gripes and measures of 'expert' when i compare to my own ideas, as things like keyboard shortcuts, for eg, which some rate as vital, are utterly unimportant to me, and im sure the same would be true when thinking about what i think might be important

So how might i rate an expert? perhaps if you can use excel to solve the problem at hand, then you become the expert for that job. for the next project, maybe you have to sit back and give others a turn.

 

[tweedle]

Cindy has touched on a good point. The standard for being considered an 'expert' at the office is lower than that required on internet forums, on the basis of peer review. The most complex solutions here will rarely see the light of day in the office.

This is why I so enjoy being a p/t trawler of this forum.
It's so much more challenging than anything the kids in the office think up.

Do employers tell you to do some things in excel "their way", simply because they don't understand your formula?
I've run into this problem in a past workplace. My former supervisor hated when I did array-entered INDEX/MATCH formulas to match on multiple conditions. They much prefered that I made a concatenate helper column for what I need to match, and then index/match off of those. Even after trying to explain it in depth and how my method is more accurate, I was still told to use the concatenate method because "If I don't understand it, I don't want you to use it."

Absolutely; I was once asked on a contract if I "could do INDEX/MATCHes'.
Upon learning that I could, they had me decypher literally hundreds of them that someone (imo) of Expert/MVP caliber built, because their lack of understanding had frozen the bonus process. [I'm pretty sure I was 'schooled' on that job; backing into them isn't nearly as easy as building them]

Cindy's scale is pretty much dead-on.

 

[MrKowz]

Absolutely; I was once asked on a contract if I "could do INDEX/MATCHes'.
Upon learning that I could, they had me decypher literally hundreds of them that someone (imo) of Expert/MVP caliber built, because their lack of understanding had frozen the bonus process. [I'm pretty sure I was 'schooled' on that job; backing into them isn't nearly as easy as building them]

Reverse-Engineering someone's spaghetti-stringed code or scatterbrained megaformulas in Excel is exponentially harder than creating the code from scratch.