Steve's Excel Learning Journey

Phase 2

In 2002 I started my distribution analyst job at Walmart Canada. I quickly found my Excel skills was not sufficient to do a good job. I bought many brick-thick Excel books, and was determined to improve my Excel skills in a short time. Three years after, I still did not go passing the first few chapters of those books. On the contrary, I have learned from my colleagues the most needed functions and features like, VLOOKUP, SUMIF, COUNTIF, IF, and Pivot Tables.

 I could not continue reading the Excel books, simply because I could not see when/where/how those boring concepts can help me in my analyst job after going through first few chapters spending large amount of hours. As a hindsight, if I really spent thousand hours and went through every chapter of the book, I sure would have learned a lot of Excel skills. But who has thousand hours to spend on something while you knew only 30 hours of materials are what you really need at the time?

I enjoyed my work very much, and was proud of my work, including the five-year forecast I conducted every quarter for Walmart Canada’s new food business at that time, even though that was quite time consuming. I used lots of formulas, prepared very complex workbook with lots of data. Each quarter, I had to conduct numerous rounds of the five-year forecast, because many of those inputs and parameters would change based on information from various functional divisions of the company. For every small input or parameter change, I spent half day to adjust my formulas to recalculate, because all those inputs and parameters are hard coded in the formula, and not variables. Now looking back, I really laughed at my forecast back then, because all those half-day work, now can be done in five minutes as I would set it up as an Excel model.

Phase 3

In 2005 I joined LCBO as a senior supply chain analyst. I went in with very high confidence on my advanced (I thought) Excel skills. A couple of weeks in the job, I was completely shocked at how advanced my new colleagues were using Excel, and felt how naive I was in believing I was at advanced level in terms of Excel skills.

My new colleagues were doing much more complicated and larger volume data analyses, and they could get it done in much shorter time frame. They used a lot of logical functions, text manipulating functions, lookup functions. Most importantly, they combined all those functions together, built nested formulas and models.

Besides, they did not use the mouse much, because they did most of the work on keyboard. I only saw screen pop up and gone, cursor moving around very quickly, but I did not know how they were able to navigate to anywhere the cursor needs to be with the keyboard, and performing those commands without clicking on anywhere with the mouse.

 In my first three years as senior supply chain analyst, I observed my advanced level colleagues’ Excel work carefully and analyzed their Excel model thoroughly. At the same time, I started actively learning from various sources on new and creative ways of using the Excel features and functions to process and analyze data. Finally, six years after I started analyst job, I reached a level to be able to process and analyze data within Excel very effectively and efficiently.

In 2009 I spun off the Excel portion of the Supply Chain Management course I developed and was teaching at a private career college, and developed the very first Super Excel course and since then I taught that course every Tuesday evening in Mississauga and every Wednesday evening in Toronto, while still working full time during the day.

In 2014, with the tremendous positive feedback I received from training attendees in those five years, I quit my day job and started my Excel training business - Super Excel Inc. I have been devoting all my time to help other people to be more effective and efficient in processing, analyzing, presenting data within Excel.