High School Senior Looking to Practice Excel Skills
Good morning all,
High school senior here, who will be attending a target next year, looking to practice my Excel skills.
Any recommended courses to take? - I took an introductory course last summer and am looking to build off that.
Additional Questions:
Would anyone mind listing some of the most essential skills I will need to master in Excel?
Also, what is a “shortcut” in Excel?
You’ve got time. Don’t think you need to practice excel, time might be better off spent reading a book or trying to better understand what you want to do when you grow up. To answer some of your questions though:
Don’t spend any time on this haha
Sign up for a Udemy Excel class. That made all the difference for me as Excel mastery eluded me for years. You can find a decent one on there for $20 and they include your practice files. Don't bother using your mouse.
I think it's essential to really pick it up in college rather than waiting until you start your career. It will come in handy for internships, interviews, etc. Turn learning it into a hobby so you're not anxiously trying to pack everything in at the last minute for an interview exam or work projects.
The enthusiasm is awesome, but Excel isn't like coding in that you need to learn it in high school. They will actually never ask you about it in interviews or ask you to demonstrate it, so your time is really better spent networking (wait until soph year) and learning technicals if you want to actively work on banking prep, or joining clubs and getting leadership positions for your resume (great thing to do off the bat as a freshman). A lot of summer interns show up with zero idea of how to model or use Excel beyond some basic work for classes, so there is a whole training portion of being an analyst to cover this. It's good to start now if you have some free time, but you don't need to spend 4 years of college mastering it, it's just really not that hard to pick up.
I would look for any free online resources - corp finance institute, asimplemodel, etc. Don't pay to learn modeling right now.
A shortcut is a keyboard shortcut to do something faster. You probably use Ctrl + C to copy, that's a shortcut. Banks and Excel have special "macros" so that if I key in like Ctrl + Shift + $ it will toggle different currency formats.
Any suggestions for sources to learn technicals?
The Rosenbaum & Pearl book is extremely in depth - great for people who have a lot of time, college freshmen, non finance majors etc. Not necessary if you're a sophomore now or a finance major.
For a more realistic way to learn, google BIWS technical PDF, and M&I 400 is also a good resource. Make a Google Doc of questions and fill out answers to them. Search on here for technicals to add to your list. If you are confused on accounting, try to learn 3 statement models and build a basic 3 statement that connects, just to understand how stuff flows through. I personally would not pay for any of the guides you will find, $200+ is too much for a college student when all of the info is readily available online.
Sounds cliche, but unplug your mouse and try to to basic stuff like calculations, copy/pasting, autofiltering,...etc.
The Alt key is your best friend, and you'll be significantly faster once you build the muscle memory. Nowadays, I don't even know which keys I have to press to do something; it's all ingrained.
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