SSSVEDA DAY 4 – Sharing the Excel Knowledge

The theme of today’s episode is about finding better ways to get the job done. And nothing helps take the Excel community towards this end better than sharing of Excel knowledge. To demonstrate this, Oz will be describing one of his own experiences from the early days.

Let’s get to it.

1 – Doing the Wrong Things for the Greater Good

Oz started the episode with Alex Powers’ (of IT’S NOT ABOUT THE CELL) Facebook comment about a blog post. He mentioned that experts in the Excel world spend a lot of time doing the wrong things. This helps share knowledge with others to enable them to do the right things. Hence, this sharing of knowledge helps shorten the learning curve tremendously for many Excel users.

2 – His Own Experience

Oz mentioned one of his own experiences from the start of his career.

He had two reports: one containing thousands of transactions for the month and the other had name and id data of customer service representatives. His job was to match the two reports to calculate the bonuses to be paid. He sorted, filtered, copied, pasted and manually highlight cells, but eventually the job got done.

Turns out, the report Oz was handed was not the latest extract. And that he’d have to do all this all over again. 2-3 hours of effort completely wasted.

But he had discovered VLOOKUP in time for the second iteration. Now doing the work all over again hardly took a few minutes. The lesson to take away from all this: always ask yourself if there is a better way to get things done. Stop doing things the wrong way!

3 – Bonus

An entertaining section on vlogging (or video blogging) awaits you at the end of the video. Enjoy!

What’s next?

If something is taking a lot of time, try to find out if there is a better, faster way to do it. You have all the knowledge Excel experts have shared freely to leverage.

Write your thoughts to us in the comments section below. And do not forget to share this video with your friends and colleagues.

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And while you are at it… Check out all the great Excel videos on Oz’s Youtube channel.  He’s on Fire.

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Jamani Arsalan

I am a healthcare consultant, currently based in Middle East, at an international professional services firm. My work largely revolves around project management, and statistical analysis. And my professional interests include developing my knowledge within the discipline of health analytics.

Latest posts by Jamani Arsalan (see all)

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• SSSVEDA DAY 4 – Sharing the Excel Knowledge - July 18, 2017