Anyone who says they're an excel expert is almost always barely intermediate. People who actually know excel know that they have just scratched the surface.
when I was 17 I took a Office extracurricular and got a bunch of certificates. My teacher thought it was enough to get me into a serious event. Got teamed with a couple guys that I never met and we randomly decided what to do between Excel, Power Point and World. We later found out that every member of the other teams coordinated and only studied one of the three in depth, we just winged it. I had to do Power Point, scored something like 550/1000 while the well prepared teams were up in the 900-975 range. The poor guy from our team who had to do Excel scored ~400. It was humiliating to say the least. The three of us got extremely high grades in the certification exams but the knowledge required to compete in such events was 1000 levels above whatever we thought we knew
There an organization called the Financial Modeling World Cup, which hosts events that are based around using Excel to answer increasingly complex questions regarding some kind of dataset. Competitors have a time limit and earn points for each correct answer that they produce. One of the events they run is called the Microsoft Excel World Championship.
That's what opened my eyes to how little of excel I know.
I have my young coworker finding out new things and trying to find something I didn't know before, pumping up my excel ego. Then I watched that and was so, so humbled.
Well that's just your opinion. There's was a time where Visual Basic was the only means of extending Excel's functionality beyond the program. Those days are done. Flowing data into and out of Excel have many methods now, and security and version control has made VBA add-in much less desirable.
Excel is awful for version control in general, this isn't isolated to VBA.
And for a long time, VBA has been the only real option if you want scripting inside an Excel workbook. Of course you can script from outside the workbook, e.g. Python, but at that point you probably should be considering a database instead of Excel anyway.
By the time your Excel workbook needs vba, you should probably be doing something else for that report.
Most of the scenarios I've seen could be solved through Power Query, using another tool like PBI, or just straight up getting better at writing functions. ESPECIALLY if you're trying to use Excel itself as a database....
The real skill test is how effective they can work without a mouse.
I automated away an entire third of my responsibilities with VB macros through Excel at an old job.
I had to generate weekly, monthly, and quarterly reports. How it was explained to me was "Oh, grab these metrics, make this graph, set these settings, align it so that it's perfect with last month's graph, do 200 other steps, etc. Should take you about 2 hours per report."
Yeah I just had it do all of that in VB. It took like 3 seconds to run once I pasted the data into the sheet. I'd submit like 2-3 of them per day and my boss was like "Wow! You're really good at these reports!" but in reality I was copy-pasting data from one program, running the macro, and then watching two episodes of Breaking Bad on my phone.
I am advanced enough to code in vba but avoid it at all costs. There is almost no good reason to do vba 99% of the time. If you need to code, you are better off having a proper IT department automate the function behind the scenes.
I agree, but would take that one step further. If someone says they’re an expert in anything, they usually aren’t. Real experts have been around long enough to be humbled.
I’ve met one true excel expert in my life - my first boss in my first engineering internship back in 2006.
He had regular calls with excel devs at Microsoft to discuss all the bugs he’d find over the course of a week. He didn’t care about getting paid/credit… he just needed it to work.
Anyone who says they're an excel expert is almost always barely intermediate
A part of me thinks one of the root causes of this is how HR works. HR doesn't want intermediate excel users, they want Advanced Users, to do data entry.
Just like they want 5 years of experience in the latest technology that came out 2 years ago.
People who are experts at Excel keep their damn mouths shut. If they don't, they are now responsible for maintaining every report and VBA script in the department for free.
If it's for a job interview, the best way is probably to get some sort of advanced certification. Aside from avoiding the problem you're talking about, a cert weighs more heavily than just your word.
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u/psodstrikesback 1d ago
Anyone who says they're an excel expert is almost always barely intermediate. People who actually know excel know that they have just scratched the surface.