New to Corporate Finance. Embarrassed by my poor Excel skills. How do I get better?
First role in finance at my company. It’s a corporate FP&A position reporting to senior leadership. Fortunately I’ve been with the company for sometime so I know our business. I also have formal education in economics. However I’m struggling with the office tasks, Excel in particular. Tips on ways to learn, practice, and improve?
Familiarize yourself with excel shortcuts for formatting. The + isn’t the actual key, just denoting the following letters to hit
Highlight data set then ALT + NV for pivot table
ALT + HB to open the border menu
HBO bottom border
HBL left, HBR right, HBP top
HBY to open border line style menu
ALT + HEA clears all cell contents including formatting
ALT + HFC font color
ALT + HH to fill cell, HHN to clear cell fill
On a data set with filters, ALT down arrow will open the filter drop down
ALT + ESV to paste as values, but sometimes CTRL + ALT + V to open the paste special and using the arrows to go down to values is faster for me
ALT + HK to put commas in numbers and 2 decimal places
CTRL + Shift to select an entire row
CTRL + Spacebar to select an entire column
Once a column/row is selected, CTRL + (so actually hit the plus sign) will insert a new column or row
Learn basic formulas. You should be able to XLookup without thinking
SumIf(s) are crucial as well
If(And) as well as If(Or)
Learn how to utilize if statements. You can combine if statements with other formulas like xlookup
ALT + WFF to freeze panes on your selected cell as the home cell
Speed comes the more you use excel. I don’t use Macros or python or any of that stuff
ALT + HOI to auto-fit column widths
ALT + HOH to set row heights
ALT + HOW to set column widths
take the wallstreetprep excel crash course
best $20 I spent early in my career
Online modelling courses
Build models from scratch / replicate templates
Unplug the mouse
Get a smart shortcuts add on
My three best advice:
1. Learn how to INDEXMATCH. Logic: =INDEX(the area where the values you want to obtain are - sometimes in another sheet),MATCH(the reference cell, the area that should be matched with the reference cell - same size (length) as the INDEX area, 0) – don't forget the 0 in the end of the match function!!
2. Use checks everywhere. For example, in a balance sheet, I would in a "check cell" put assets minus equity + liabilities (which should be 0). And then I make a "check check" cell somewhere else in the sheet where I just do "sum" the check cell row. I format it so a value above 0 turns red (meaning that there is imbalance somewhere)
3. IFERROR formula. Makes it easy to spot mistakes.
The other responses are giving you a good cheatsheet, so I won't belabor that. I'll just advise you to have the mindset that if someone can tell you concretely what the steps are to do something in excel, it is highly likely that it can be automated. If something takes zero brain power and just memory, it's likely you can write a formula to do that task. From there, google what you are trying to do and you'll find suggestions.
It takes a lot of practice- I think the real hurdle is learning what excel is capable of. Once you have that, the rest is just piecing together various formulas that accomplish what you want to do. A great way to learn is to follow around the formulas from the experts on your team- learn exactly what each piece is doing and why. Doesn't hurt to ask people too- people loooooove to show off their excel skills.
Don't be ashamed- you'd be surprised to see some of the shit-tier excel I've seen at F500 companies. My favorite example is this lady who was manually typing in numbers and only using plus signs for "formulas".. When she retired I turned one of her day-long weekly projects into a 10 min refresh
TTS (training the street).
Pretty sure WSO has like a bazillion courses and tips also.
YouTube.
LinkedIn learning has some good introductory level stuff.
Tbh like anything/ developing better skills just comes with using it…
I was average at excel when I worked in Wealth mgmt(pre MBA) I am in graduating with my MBA in spring and going to treasury for a BB .
I took a lot of finance courses which forced me to use it a lot every day . We worked on a bunch of different HBS case studies in these classes some great topics covered forecasting, capital budgeting, hedging, swaps, doing DCFs, comparables multiples etc…. Hope this helps ! Cheers
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