Hello, and welcome to the site.
I’ve been working with Excel ever since I started my professional life, and have seen its development for well over two decades.
With most teenagers having access to laptops, and using desktop applications daily, my introduction to spreadsheets was quite formal – an optional computing module taken in the IT lab at university as part of my Chemistry degree. Enter ‘Lotus 1-2-3’ into my life…
Luckily for me (and for this website), my early corporate roles required me to pivot (excuse the Excel pun) from Lotus 1-2-3, to working with Excel on a daily basis. Typical tasks would include creating workbooks to calculate bond pricing, to creating reports for comparative analysis and performance metrics for portfolio investing. Before long, I was using Excel for financial and scenario modelling, where at the time Excel was very much the go-to tool.
My career has taken me into both an accountancy and financial systems development. However it’s likely that regardless of the process I build, users still want some kind of output into Excel to help them with ad hoc analysis or internal report preparation.
Learning Excel for my own needs and helping colleagues meet their data requirements, has pushed my understanding of what Excel can do. Whether tasks have required dashboards, VBA automation, UDF Add-ins and connectivity to SQL databases or third party applications, or integrating Python with Excel, there is always something new to learn. And that’s without even touching on Power BI and other official Power Platform products.
With knowledge of the functionality of Excel, came realization of best practice techniques to be use; when Excel can and shouldn’t be used; as well as model testing and performance management. Where relevant, I shall try to include these in posts as the site develops.
Hopefully you’ll find some additional tips and insights here to help you achieve your goals – with Excel in particular, and Data Analysis in general.