I am a financial analyst in a construction firm. I’ve been dealing with Excel pro-forma a lot. Just curious, are there anyone spend a lot of money on taking excel classes and trying to improve excel skills like me ?
A question for more senior financial analyst, or any kind of analyst: How important is excel skills to your career?
Seems like excellent excel skills are necessary for any financial analyst. You going to do the math in your head? Plus as a senior, you need to review junior analyst workbooks.
I think it would help
there are people who claim that Excel is for little companies and the big boys should be working on their SQL pulls and dedicated reported systems like Hyperion
I still think there’s value to knowing Macros and how to do good-looking reports in Excel. Some Fortune 500’s still rely heavily on Excel believe it or not.
Agreed, although I am not suprised about big companies (or any company) relying on Excel. Excel is the blank slate of number-crunching. It survives because custom programs and systems are often too nuanced to have widespread adoption. It is the perfect package of the basic building blocks.
There are more specialized problems in the world that require a custom solution than there are generalized problems that require a general solution, so Excel prospers. For many of these problems, it is the simplest, cheapest and most flexible platform in which to develop that custom solution.
Despite its bugs, everyone knows something about Excel so you are almost guaranteed a universal medium to exchange your calculations or model that everyone will get. Almost everyone also has Excel installed on their computer, so there’s no major issues in distributing whatever model or application you’ve developed.
In short, I really wish that people would just accept this and a) stop beating up on Excel in general, and b) stop being embarrassed for being an expert Excel user or VBA programmer.
There’s definite value in being able to get things done quickly. I worked at Comcast for 1.5 years as a financial analyst and everything we did was in Excel. All the top people were pros at Excel.
form my experience. if ur young, ur gonna be youtubing and googling a lot to get things done. the older you get, you will be faster and train ppl how to use it. then when ur really old and baller status, you can stop learning and hire a guy to print everthing for u, and juss write stuff on it when u want changes.
I agree. But when you say excelent excel skills… how excellent are we talking about. Is it VBA kind of excellence? or fancy report with scenario, sensitivity analysis? or complicated formula and pro-forma model kind of excellence?
That’s a good summary…I want to ask a follow up question.
If asking you to rank 3 skills: Excel, Industry knowledge, Communication skills. How will you rank them?
I assume different seniority has different ranking?
At my company the VBA/SQL writing for the excel files are done by the finance support IT team. The accountants/analysts themselves dont do the coding.
Id say it depends on the industry and company, honestly. Some industries are much more complex and specific and certain companies are more collaborative, while others are like working in a silo.
well as you move higher up excel skills will matter less. Also the improvements in excel skills will matter less as you improve (the different between beginner and intermediate is more important than between intermediate and advanced). If you wondering what to work on I would say get to the point where you are comfortable with excel, but not necessarily a wizard, then communication skills will be the most important thing, and the most transferable across jobs.
Industry knowledge is also important but the best way to learn that is by work in in an industry, so look at some outside sources maybe, but really that just comes from working.
if u can sell, u’ll do well. communciation is most important, its the highest level. problem is, u wont be convincing if u dont know anything so industry knowledge is something u need to know if u want to catch big fish. it takes time, u learn it incrementally. excel just makes the presentation look nicer/professional. also most ppl already have financials in excel spreadsheets that you can juss print out. all the margins already calculated for you. so excel is pretty useless. imo. i can confidently say, my boss can hire anyone, and i can train them how to use excel within a month.
in terms of excel.
i can make charts. i can use pivot tables. i can make tables. i kno how to sort crap. how to set printing parameters. the hardest thing i kno in excel is create macro code. i learned it when i worked at a consulting firm. but yea, i rarely use any of it anymore.
Interesting. I totally agree with you. However, I don’t quite understand the counter arguments… why people would be embarrassed for being an expert Excel user or VBA programmer?
Interesting. I totally agree with you. However, I don’t quite understand the counter arguments…. why people would be embarrassed for being an expert Excel user or VBA programmer?
I automate a lot of stuff in Excel. This saves me a ton of time and allows me to be more efficient. And I can take that knowledge of automation anywhere
When you go down the rabbit hole and begin to create some very sophisticated processes and applications within Excel using VBA, you come across a lot of problems and spend a lot of time on programmer forums. And there you come across people who are either pure programmers, or if in finance, more of what we would truly consider a quant, and they tend to be very snooty about programming languages and look down at VBA as sort of a beginner’s language. In their minds, if you don’t code in something like C++ or Python, you are a noob. But the truth is, you can accomplish some pretty sophisticated stuff with VBA.
I’m not saying I’m embarrassed…I’m saying many people tend to be apologists for Excel VBA, but they shouldn’t be.
IMO, the most important aspect about modeling in excel isn’t the complex formulas, it’s setting it up in a way that keeps your information organized and doesn’t blow up when something significant changes. I used to model with complex formulas but after several years of rewriting formuals because of unforeseen (structural) changes, i’ve simplified my ways. Think about building in layers opposed one big block of information. If one of the layers changes, it’ll flow through the rest of the (unchanged) spreadsheet.
Doing a model in layers means you spend most of your time just updating a layer or building cross-checks opposed to dissecting broken formulas.
^ Exactly. It’s not just “Excel skills”, it’s real-world experience and reasoning skills that really matter.