anyone have a good experience trying to beef up on their excel skills via a live class in their city or by some online training program? Id like to improve to make myself a better candidate when I apply for finance jobs.


was thinking of just getting this https://www.ttsuniversity.com/Produc..._best_practice

How could do you have to be?

This is free but too basic:

http://www.homeandlearn.co.uk/me/MicrosoftExcel.html

for $75 its really pretty cheap.

yeah. wondering if anyone has a good experience with another product though

Just my $0.02 but the key to being able to use excel well does not lie in being able to write formulas and programs off the top of your head. There's so many online help sites and forums that as long as you have a general idea of what function you need, you should be able to read about it online and implement it reasonably quickly.

I'd look for something that gives a good outline of what each function does and is good for, as opposed to something that explains the minutia of making the syntax work in every possible scenario.

Just from the teaser video for that site they have catered their presentation to financials. Granted its a simple thing, but they introduce color coding standards, and probably other items that anyone in the industry would take for granted. Standardization is a good thing when applying for a position.

I agree with Doug about writing them, most everyone these days must be modifying and saving for more and more templates. Its what I've done from back in the days of quattro pro.

If you know any kind of programming it's very helpful for vba since there's a lot of stuff you just can't do in excel without vba. Also, their macro recording program is very useful if u don't know the syntax like me.

and in investment work color coding and presentation are p helpful. I def color code everything i do

do you mean like drivers are blue, referenced numbers are green, inputs are black?

I didn't learn from a "formal" lecture of any kind so I do
referenced: black
historical knowns: blue
projected: red
for income. I also do some funny colors for stuff if i need to such as key drivers.

it also differs with models. there are some where you want to do an evaluation for a stock and in order to do so you need to fill in specific spaces for values. for those i generally use gray backgrounds

Not sure how advanced you need or want to be in Excel, but in all honesty you can google most formulas you need. Do a search like "excel how to..xxxxx..." you can pretty much find what you need.

I work in finance and have experience getting boatloads of raw, badly formatted data. Vlookups/Hlookups/pivot tables were by far the most useful things I could use.

Practice getting a crapload of baseball stats or something in data format. Put in an Excel tab. Create a pivot table and then create graphs based off it. It's surprisingly useful if you realize that one of the neverending themes that come up in finance is variance analysis - getting two sets of data and comparing the two and finding the differences, then extrapolating your analysis from that. It seemed everything I did was "this is what happened here, compare it to what happened there and analyze it".

Once I realized that, everything was that "Oh, I get it".

Actually, I can get you some excel spreadsheets that we use, formulas that reference other tabs, tables, etc. Let me know if you're interested, PM your email and I'll send them to you if you want to take a look.

The only problem with this is what if in an interview you are asked to prepare a small sample report for the employer in the allotted period of time. The basic free stuff online for excel might not be enough.

I would suggest if you can get a moderately priced program at a local college that would be your best option.

Remember PRACTICE PRACTICE PRACTICE

Try to do stove in VBA....That is my current project to try to get better with VBA...
You can find anything you want online...need a cool project though or you are drawing dead out of boredom...
I would take CS101 at community college over any kind of excel class.

Lynda.com got some videos on Excel

I was learning excel during the summer, ended up with lynda.com videos, vtc videos, they are pretty helpful.

Then my mom told me to they needed something for work, I said I could give it a try.
In that week, which the project took, I felt like I was _rly_ learning how to use excel, use the functions etc. It also sticks in your memory alot longer then just following theory videos.
I would suggest first learning a bit of theory (finance and math functions in your case, regression, standard nice functions like vlookup, index, autosum etc, pivottables) then try it out in practice.

Excel is ridiculously accessable to learn. Toy around with functions, google whenever you cant make sense of a function, first link usually helps you.

VBA(used to make macro's) is nice to learn aswell.

Ahnuld, here's a free N&A model set from some guys I know.

http://breakingintowallstreet.com/biws/

More on TTS:

http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2010/09..._bootcamp.html

VBA is imperative and i wouldn't bother with any course that doesn't get into it

Something like this. get stuck into a project and then google when you get stuck on specifics. Courses are a very expensive inefficient way of learning, they're only suitable for people whose firms are paying (I've sold them and given the odd advanced course). VBA (and VB) is an excellent skill, far more powerful then most poeple imagine.

Formulae are not important just look up what you need when you need it, good spreadsheet people can make them sing and dance.

[old git warning- I go back all the way to Lotus 123 version 1 running on a Sirius PC running Dos version 1 which was IBM compatible before such a thing existed. Lotus was copy protected on 8" disks back then.]

http://www.youtube.com/user/ExcelIsFun

this dude has an unhealthy obsession with excel but has videos covering almost everything as well as free work along .xls

Where is it imperative? What role?

Sorry, not trying to argue with you, just wondering because I never knew it to be "imperative", and I worked for approx 2 years in backoffice IB environment. Is it an IB front office function?

I have seen people do mind-blowing stuff purely with formula and not use VBA but its very rare and impossible to maintain.

On the other hand a good way to be unsackable is to write a complicated vital system in excel without vba.

We tried to stay away from complicated macros and totally automated spreadsheets exactly for that reason. Transparency was stressed, the ability to open a spreadsheet and follow the formulas back were stressed.

We had some spreadsheets that were impossible to decipher and people left the firm, so it caused issues.

i don't really see how you could avoid vba when dealing with processing data for trading purposes unless you want to do a lot of pain in the ass manual updating

or you could just use vba and do some decent coding. kinda answered your own question.

Couldn't hurt to ask the Excel expert in the OOT "ask me anything about Excel" thread.