What is Excel?
At its base level, Microsoft Excel is a spreadsheet application. However, its capabilities stretch far beyond simply storing and sharing data. Excel is a versatile piece of software that can be used to create visualizations, analyze data, and automate tasks. It can simplify datasets in Pivot Tables and even has its own programming language, VBA (Visual Basic for Applications). Like the other applications in the Microsoft Office suite, Excel is most often found and used in businesses, schools, and home offices.
While Excel is powerful by itself, it becomes even more powerful when used in combination with other apps. Excel integrates with other applications in the Microsoft Office suite, broadening the ways it can be used. You can connect Excel to PowerPoint to insert a chart into your slideshow or to Project to import data. Excel can also be integrated with a number of popular business applications outside of the Microsoft Office suite, such as QuickBooks, Hubspot, and Salesforce.
Why Learn Excel?
In the professional world, Excel is the industry-standard spreadsheet app. While there are alternatives, such as Google Sheets, Apple Numbers, and Smartsheet, none have the same level of usage as Excel. You will find it employed in home and business offices around the world. Companies and organizations in the financial, tech, commercial, health, education, and government sector use Excel.
Knowing Excel is also useful outside of the workplace. Students in grade school or university may use Excel to make charts for reports and presentations, complete assignments for a business class, or for other projects. If you volunteer for a nonprofit, run a club, or have a side job, you can use Excel to store and sort contact information. You can also use Excel’s many templates to make calendars, planners, personal finance trackers, and even grocery lists.
What Careers Use Excel?
Many office jobs require a basic use of Excel along with other popular Microsoft Office apps like Word, PowerPoint, and Outlook. Working as an administrative assistant, office manager, or another desk job that requires coordinating and organizing day-to-day business activities may involve frequent use of Excel. However, knowing Excel is expected of pretty much anyone who uses a computer on a regular basis for their work.
Excel is especially important for careers in finance. Working as a financial analyst, investment analyst, or investment banker will require heavy Excel use. Professionals in these industries rely on it to build financial models, complete calculations, and make visualizations for reports or presentations. Analysts in other industries use Excel as well. Some examples are business analysts, marketing analysts, and digital analysts. They rely on Excel to store and analyze data from sales and marketing campaigns.
What Excel Classes Are Available?
Taking an Excel course can be a great way to build career-oriented skills in fundamental skills like functions, formulas, and calculations as well as specialized skills like VBA programming and financial modeling. There are many training schools that offer Excel classes and certifications, including NYIM. You can find a wide range of Excel courses available to attend at our location in NYC or live online.
If you’re a new learner who wants to learn Excel fundamentals, check out the Excel for Business Bootcamp. This class starts with a review of Excel’s interface, formatting options, and basic calculations. From there, you’ll learn about Pivot Tables, lookup functions, and other more challenging material. By the end of the course, you’ll know advanced functions and basic macro creation. No matter what industry you’re in, the Excel for Business Bootcamp will give you relevant skills that you can apply right away.
Are you interested in learning high-level Excel skills for a finance career? There are a couple of courses you may want to consider. NYIM’s Financial Modeling Bootcamp combines advanced Excel training with lessons in corporate finance and accounting, valuation principles, and discount cash flow modeling. In the course, students use real-world financial data to create a valuation model and analyze the model to determine whether the business is a good investment. This class is best for students who already have intermediate knowledge of Excel. For a more beginner-friendly course, you can enroll in the Financial Analyst Training Program. This program kicks off with basic and intermediate Excel training before moving on to advanced Excel, corporate finance, financial modeling, and investment principles.
Programming macros allows you to automate common tasks in Excel and save time. To learn how to record and edit macros, use the VBA editor to write code, and use VBA to prevent errors, you can take Excel Programming with VBA. This course is suitable for anyone with intermediate-level Excel skills. No prior experience in VBA programming is required.
Certifications for Excel
Want to take your knowledge of Excel to the next level? Earning a Microsoft Office Specialist (MOS) certification will help you master the use of Excel in professional settings and stand out to employers. At NYIM, you can prepare for and take the exams for two Excel MOS certifications: the Excel Specialist Certification and the Excel Expert Certification. The Excel Specialist Certification Program and Excel Expert Certification Program both include NYIM’s full Excel Bootcamp, private tutoring in Excel, study guides, and a proctored exam with a free retake.
NYIM also runs programs that allow you to earn multiple MOS certifications, including Excel. The Microsoft Master Certification Program with Access provides training, tutoring, and certification exams for Excel, PowerPoint, Word, and Access. The Microsoft Master Certification Program with Outlook prepares you to earn certification in Excel, PowerPoint, Word, and Outlook.
What Should I Learn Besides Excel?
While Excel is useful as a standalone skill, it becomes even more versatile when combined with other business skills, especially those related to analytics and common office processes.
Learning other Microsoft Office apps is a good idea for anyone planning to take Excel classes. Many careers that involve the use of Excel require a background in other Microsoft Office software. Knowing how to use popular applications like Word, PowerPoint, and Outlook along with Excel will give you the skills to be successful at many basic office tasks. Excel can also be an entry point to Microsoft Office applications with a similar interface. For example, Project and Access both share features with Excel and have visual commonalities. They also both support Excel imports.
For those working in data or business analytics, it can be helpful to learn SQL and Tableau. SQL is a programming language used to query, organize, sort, and filter data stored in large databases. Tableau is an industry-standard data visualization app that can be used to generate complex charts, graphs, and maps. Learning SQL and Tableau will let you take your knowledge of data analytics to the next level. While Excel will allow you to complete basic tasks related to storing, analyzing, and visualizing data, you’ll need to know SQL and Tableau to be competitive for most analyst positions.
Another direction you can take after learning Excel is to learn Python. Python is a beginner-friendly coding language that data scientists, machine learning engineers, data analysts, and FinTech professionals use to clean and draw insight from large amounts of raw data. By developing experience in Python and widely used data science packages like NumPy, Matplotlib, and Pandas, you can broaden your career opportunities in a data-related field.
