Excel’s vision fulfilled
Think Excel is obsolete? You may want to have a word with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, who has called it the organization’s most important consumer product. And features have been added to the program accordingly, as Office’s release notes bear out.
“This isn’t your grandfather’s Excel,” one may be tempted to say about how features like Power Query, dynamic arrays and more have changed the spreadsheet application. In one sense, that’s true — these make it easy for anyone to quickly do things in Excel which would have previously been very difficult for even seasoned spreadsheeters to pull off.
But that democratization is what Excel was designed for all along. As Nadella put it: “Think about a world without Excel. That’s just impossible for me. People couldn’t make sense of numbers before, and now everybody can.” So it’s probably better to think of “modern Excel” as a difference in degree rather than in kind — that maybe some of the means have changed, but not the ends.
Learning to learn Excel
Quite a few books have dug deep into Excel’s new “power” features like Power Query and Power Pivot; very few have successfully integrated them with the rest of the application, and I can think of even fewer that on top of that satisfactorily covered new functions.
But Alan Murray successfully manages to do it all in his book, Advanced Excel Success: A Practical Guide to Mastering Excel. Alan, the founder of training company Computergaga, is also the co-organizer of the London Excel Meetup — a group worth visiting which you may already be familiar with as I presented on my book to them.
The premise of Alan’s book is to help business users round out the self-taught nature of their Excel education, gaining a new command over the tool. In his words:
Microsoft Excel is utilized by businesses all over the world to manage, analyze, and share data. However, most users are taught how to use the tools and formulas of Excel in a very narrow way. They have typically learned them from a colleague or through Google. They perform the steps and it does a job, but they often do not know how it returned that result. Advanced Excel Success will uncover some of the secrets that you are not told and use Excel tools in a way that you did not realize was possible.
From quickly highlighting differences between groups to writing clean conditional statements with the SWITCH() function, I was struck by how many tasks I’ve tackled in the past could have benefitted from Alan’s methods, and how many I look forward to using.
More than showing off
The subtitle of Alan’s book is “A Practical Guide to Mastering Excel,” underlying the systematic nature of its contents. Showing one-off tips and tricks is one thing, and there’s much fun and value to be had there. You’ll get plenty of these in the first chapter especially (titled “Excel Tricks and Data Tools”) and throughout the book.
But later chapters proceed into fuller subdisciplines of Excel such as functions, formatting, and charts. Along the way, you’ll see how to juxtapose newcomers like dynamic arrays and XLOOKUP() along with old favorites like conditional formatting and SUMPRODUCT(). The book ends with chapters on Power Query and Power Pivot, respectively. There’s a lot of ground covered here — a lot of Power Query and Power Pivot training reads like dispassionate manuals, whereas Alan’s chapters build naturally off the previous ones in precisely solving everyday data challenges.
There is one Excel
It’s easy to frame Excel’s new features as an admission of weakness — that “classic Excel” was just primitive software that needed a reinvention as “modern Excel.” Instead, it’s better to think of this renaissance as an admission of Excel’s strength — that these features should taken alongside what Excel can already do to democratize data.
We can talk about its different generations, but ultimately there’s one Excel. And Alan brilliantly weaves them together into one learning path with this book.
I want to thank Alan for writing such a compelling book and in general contributing so much to the community. Check out the book, attend his meetup and visit his Computergaga home page.
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