This lesson will help you describe a huge part of consulting: spreadsheets, calculations and talking about Excel.
Using Excel to do calculations is a huge part of consulting. Talking about it smoothly and confidently will help you work with your team and communicate well with your managers. In this lesson, you will practice explaining Excel data to your teacher.
If you have used Excel, then describe it in detail to your teacher.
- What do you do in Excel?
- What do you find most difficult?
Vocabulary
Look at the advice below, and discuss it with your teacher. First,
- clarify any new language; then
- decide if you agree.
- If you agree, do you typically follow this advice? Why or why not?
5 tips to use Excel well
- Before you start building, jot down what you are trying to measure or understand, and sketch out a few simple reports on a notepad.
- Decide on exactly the output you need. You don't want to boil the ocean.
- To minimize problems down the road, always use good quality, well-organized source data.
- Although it's a lot of fun watching Excel make visualizations of the data, you can find yourself going down a lot of unproductive rabbit holes very easily. So, stay focused.
- Perfect source data will have no blank rows or columns. Each column will have a unique name, and there will be no repeated data.
Explaining tasks
Read the task and tell your instructor if you've done it before, and if so, how big a task is it? If you've never done it, then discuss what it might require.
- Normalize data—make all the cells in a row or column consistent.
- Convert ALL CAPS to Proper case.
- Change the data for contact names: it is currently split into first name and last name in two separate cells, but it needs to be the full name in one cell instead.
- Find and remove incomplete rows.
- Build a pivot table.
- Export and visualize the data for a deck.
Think of a task that you know how to do well in Excel and explain it to your teacher.