What Microsoft Excel Skills Should You Learn?

Being a Microsoft Excel expert gives you a lot of advantages when it comes to landing a new job, keeping your current one, or getting promoted to a better position. It’s true that many employees know how to use several MS Office applications at this day and age. But how do you determine if you’re a basic or advanced user of the application?

Your knowledge in Microsoft Excel may be classified as basic, intermediate, advanced, or extra advanced. Each of these categories consists of a set of skills that you must master in order to get to the next level. To assess your own proficiency in using Microsoft Excel, check your skills against the categories listed below.

Basic MS Excel Skills

The basic MS Excel skills are the ones that what almost any other user can do. For starters, you should know how to create, open, and save documents. Changing the page orientation, making a print preview, and printing the page is also part of the basic MS Excel skill set. Additionally, you should know how to enter, edit, and align data in each cell, as well as select and delete a cell range, adjust rows and columns, and create headers and footers.

Intermediate MS Excel Skills

To be considered as an intermediate user of MS Excel, you should be proficient in adding and deleting rows and columns, changing cell shadings and number displays, freezing cells, and creating simple formulas. You should also know how to use the check spelling, go to, find and replace, page break, and undo features. You must also be comfortable working with the worksheets, which means you know how to add, move, rename, and delete them with ease.

Advanced MS Excel Skills

To consider yourself an advanced MS Excel user, you should be very proficient in editing and copying formulas, naming and sorting cell ranges, creating and changing chart types, and linking and filtering data. You should also know how to create macros and scenarios. Linking workbooks and using the function wizard to create formulas are essential skills as well.

Extra Advanced MS Excel Skills

The extra advanced users of MS Excel have skills that are way better than 10% of all users. These users are expert in using the different Excel functions such as SUM, COUNT, COUNTIF, IF, and VLOOKUP, among others. Sub-grouping rows and columns, as well as pasting sheets and charts into MS Word, also comes easy for them. They also know how to lock rows and columns and protect cells and worksheets from changes. They also fully understand the concepts of the advanced orientation of texts in cells and date calculations. These users can also use the fills, series, and paste special features with ease.

These are some of the skills that you should learn to be considered an expert in MS Excel. If you need help in learning any of these, simply sign up for an online training and you’ll be proficient not just in Excel but in all other MS Office applications. Be a certified MS Office specialist so that a wide range of opportunity will open up for you.