Need some commodities sales trader advices

Hi all,

About to start a sales internship in an european energy company in two weeks and I am little worried about what should I know about Excel. I learned all the products the company is working on and I follow the different markets (oil&gas, energy, coal) but it's not enough. I know that Excel is really important but I don't know what should I learn to help a sales. I wonder what formulas on Excel are essential as an intern, and what should I know about VBA ? Some people told me about Match, Vlookup, Hlookup but without explaining anything.

Thank you.

9 Comments
 

I don't really do sales, but I do trading in commodities, so what exactly will be your role, as in what will you be doing?

make it hard to spot the general by working like a soldier
 

First, I will do lot of pricing for the clients, it will be the most important task and I will do it a lot.

Then some minor tasks like: execution of flow business orders, production of sales performance reportings, qualitative analysis, data analysis and statistic production. Various types of analysis and monitoring.

Yes I have excel and vba for dummies, but I wanted to know if some formulas are mandatory.

 

GDF?

Honestly you don't really need to know much on Excel going in, it's much easier to learn by trial and error (and Google). If something seems too asinine to do, there's probably a formula for it.

IF, SUMIF and SUMPRODUCT are probably worth looking into before hand so you have a basic idea of what they can do. Pivot Tables as well (though I tend to avoid them since they're such a black box).

Also, this is just me but I'm a big fan of Index-Match as opposed to VLookup, seems a lot more resilient.

 

Yes GDF !

Ok thank you, so I don't have to worry about Excel, I will learn during the internship. I wanted to be ready and as efficient as possible. I guess each company has a software for pricing ? and Excel is minor ?

Alright I will work on these formulas. There are good videos on youtube for that. For pivot tables too.

I'm learning all of them, I think that if I master these formulas it will help and I will understand if they ask me to use them.

 

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