FP&A offer! Need advice

Hey guys,

I just received a summer internship offer for an FP&A role at a tech company on the west coast. Admittedly I'm not too good with excel regarding the different functions I'll probably need to know well. I use it often and can go about formatting and making charts w/o a mouse but just not experienced with the functions.

What should I know coming into this internship? What excel functions should I know like the back of my hand? Any advice appreciated! Thanks guys

 
Best Response
accountingbyday:

If you're using Excel regularly you're probably in pretty good shape. I'd just spend a little bit of time learning sumif, sumifs, vlookups and pivot tables.

Awesome, thank you for the leads. I've used it before for one of my classes where we had to project the financials for a company an link them together. We made an lbo model off of it too. Surprising how little you really learn from doing things like that. Shortcuts and simple functions yeah but no experience doing pivot tables and vlookup.

 

the lookup functions (i.e vlookup, hlookup, etc) and pivot tables were what i used a lot during my fp&a internship last year. i learned to use index-match towards the end cuz there were a lot of variables being considered. other than those, basic functions like average, sum, product, etc.

 

a real good one is learning about the different uses of sumproduct(). easily one of the most powerful functions in excel, and can do the job of a sumifs, countifs, etc.

It is essentially an array formula without actually having to be entered as an array. You may not need it for an internship, but your colleagues will be impressed for sure. I just recently started using them because I switched from FP&A where i had excel 2010 and could use sumifs etc, to a banking job with excel 2003. All the sudden, sumproduct was the only thing I could use to sum or count or multiply numbers based on 4+ criteria

You can try taking a look at this site for an overview: http://chandoo.org/wp/2009/11/10/excel-sumproduct-formula/

Remember, once you're inside you're on your own. Oh, you mean I can't count on you? No. Good!
 
snakeplissken:

a real good one is learning about the different uses of sumproduct(). easily one of the most powerful functions in excel, and can do the job of a sumifs, countifs, etc.

It is essentially an array formula without actually having to be entered as an array. You may not need it for an internship, but your colleagues will be impressed for sure. I just recently started using them because I switched from FP&A where i had excel 2010 and could use sumifs etc, to a banking job with excel 2003. All the sudden, sumproduct was the only thing I could use to sum or count or multiply numbers based on 4+ criteria

You can try taking a look at this site for an overview:
http://chandoo.org/wp/2009/11/10/excel-sumproduct-...

Awesome! Really appreciate you going over the capabilities and the link. I never heard of the function.

 

You will pick up the functions pretty quickly if you practice them a few times. I would also spend a lot of time focusing on keyboard shortcuts. There are several places online you can find them with a quick search.

Learning how to get around an excel workbook without using your mouse will save you a TON of time and will make you look like a pro.

"Everybody needs money. That's why they call it money." - Mickey Bergman - Heist (2001)
 

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