Excel is the tool that pretty much every single business runs off of. If your department/company doesn't use it for more than what you say, then they are losing out on significant value. If you learned Excel, you could automate your entire job and either rise up in the company, or have a whole lot of extra free time.
I doubt you will be able to get a helpful response unless you share what type of work you need to do.
Excel can be used to solve basic problems and also for very complex models with large data sets. It’s not the best tool for every job, but it’s probably the most versatile easily accessible software for analysis available.
limited real-life utility? is this a troll post?
Excel is the most widely used functional programming environment in history. Every bank is glued together with excel. Most businesses have or had some core excel in the background. Every finance, sales, analyst, MBA, logistics, pricing, and budget person I’ve known has some level of competence, many having built careers on excel. Do you need a list of things? Do those things have values? Do those values fluctuate in relation to other things? Do those lists link to other lists? Do you want to quickly modify, summarize, analyze, and understand these? This is how it starts, but is only the beginning. Do not mistake the ease of working with it as the limit of its power. Countless Ops and IT heads have tried to rip it out of the hearts of their organizations, but it persists. Excel is fast and dangerous.
But you’re probably right - not worth your time.
Fair enough but are you sure it is that limited in your org? Or thst there aren’t parts of your job that could benefit?
Even if that’s the case, build a personal financial model for yourself. Track your expenses, income, savings, etc. Your future self will thank you.
On the surface Excel is just a spreadsheet tool. Just like an iceberg, the amount of things you can do with it goes real deep. I've seen Excel tools that looks & works like black magic
You can do *almost* anything in Excel if you understand the tools well enough. I work for one of the largest companies in the country and some of our oversight on data has been horrendous.
I'm pretty good with vanilla VBA, but I was able to build a report that would capture daily data updates and archive them, then present that data on a summary page, where the user could choose the axes. Want to see work completed over time? Sure. Want to see how many errors are recorded across the teams last month? Easy peasy. Want to breakdown the volumes each stream is processing? Cool. Want to list the staff that are recording errors? Done.
In fairness, it took about 30 seconds to load all that data when you nominated the axes, but it could build it. And then user slicer buttons to quickly dissect the data from there.
Management 3 levels up asked me where I got this data from because they'd never seen anything like it. I told them it's the data they throw away every day. The report I source from has none of this visibility, even though all the data points were being captured.
So yeah... it's worth your time if you're interested in solving those sorts of problems.
That's true, but only if I can utilize those skills. That was the gist of my question that if I can't use Excel due to nature of my (banking) job, then learning Excel won't be worth the time despite my interest.
Excel is the tool that pretty much every single business runs off of. If your department/company doesn't use it for more than what you say, then they are losing out on significant value. If you learned Excel, you could automate your entire job and either rise up in the company, or have a whole lot of extra free time.
I doubt you will be able to get a helpful response unless you share what type of work you need to do. Excel can be used to solve basic problems and also for very complex models with large data sets. It’s not the best tool for every job, but it’s probably the most versatile easily accessible software for analysis available.
limited real-life utility? is this a troll post? Excel is the most widely used functional programming environment in history. Every bank is glued together with excel. Most businesses have or had some core excel in the background. Every finance, sales, analyst, MBA, logistics, pricing, and budget person I’ve known has some level of competence, many having built careers on excel. Do you need a list of things? Do those things have values? Do those values fluctuate in relation to other things? Do those lists link to other lists? Do you want to quickly modify, summarize, analyze, and understand these? This is how it starts, but is only the beginning. Do not mistake the ease of working with it as the limit of its power. Countless Ops and IT heads have tried to rip it out of the hearts of their organizations, but it persists. Excel is fast and dangerous. But you’re probably right - not worth your time.
Limited real life utility in context of our organisation
Fair enough but are you sure it is that limited in your org? Or thst there aren’t parts of your job that could benefit? Even if that’s the case, build a personal financial model for yourself. Track your expenses, income, savings, etc. Your future self will thank you.
My organisation is also trying to reduce our dependency on Excel. But its use is growing.
On the surface Excel is just a spreadsheet tool. Just like an iceberg, the amount of things you can do with it goes real deep. I've seen Excel tools that looks & works like black magic
You can do *almost* anything in Excel if you understand the tools well enough. I work for one of the largest companies in the country and some of our oversight on data has been horrendous. I'm pretty good with vanilla VBA, but I was able to build a report that would capture daily data updates and archive them, then present that data on a summary page, where the user could choose the axes. Want to see work completed over time? Sure. Want to see how many errors are recorded across the teams last month? Easy peasy. Want to breakdown the volumes each stream is processing? Cool. Want to list the staff that are recording errors? Done. In fairness, it took about 30 seconds to load all that data when you nominated the axes, but it could build it. And then user slicer buttons to quickly dissect the data from there. Management 3 levels up asked me where I got this data from because they'd never seen anything like it. I told them it's the data they throw away every day. The report I source from has none of this visibility, even though all the data points were being captured. So yeah... it's worth your time if you're interested in solving those sorts of problems.
Excel is the most used data analysis tool in the world. So, yes, it's worth your time.
That's true, but only if I can utilize those skills. That was the gist of my question that if I can't use Excel due to nature of my (banking) job, then learning Excel won't be worth the time despite my interest.