[Answer] How Can You Learn Excel Systematically?

[Answer] How Can You Learn Excel Systematically?

First of all, it’s best to buy a book or follow a tutorial. If you rely only on figuring things out by yourself, progress will be much slower.

In practice, learning can be divided into the following three levels.

The first level is becoming familiar with Excel’s basic operations. Don’t underestimate this skill. Even after using Excel for many years, a lot of people still don’t know special copy-and-paste functions such as pasting formats or transposing matrices. They may not know how to use basic SUM formulas or auto-fill either. Excel’s basic features are enough to handle all kinds of everyday work, and some of its built-in shortcuts and techniques can make your work far more efficient. But if you never explore these features and only use Excel to type in numbers, it’s like riding a BMW or Mercedes as if it were just a bicycle.

The second level is becoming familiar with formulas and data processing. Naturally, this builds on a solid grasp of the first level. Excel has a huge number of formulas, as well as functions for data extraction, pivot tables, and more. These are more than enough for almost all everyday office data-processing needs. But mastering them requires both careful study over a period of time and learning through practice. Once you become comfortable with this set of features, among non-technical people who do not know programming, you can already be considered quite skilled with Excel.

The third level is understanding macros and VBA programming. This part requires some background knowledge in computing and some focused study. Excel’s macro features and VBA programming capabilities open up an extremely broad world of possibilities. Although VBA is not a great language—sorry, I really couldn’t resist complaining about that—it is simple to use and tightly integrated with Office. Built on top of Office’s powerful foundation, it can still be used to do a great many things. For example, you can write a practical program in Excel, or even go further and build an ERP system with it.

What I’ve said above applies not only to Excel, but also to Microsoft Office as a whole. Of course, to truly master any subject, according to the well-known 10,000-hour rule, you need to keep practicing and studying continuously. After around 10,000 hours of skilled practice, you can more or less become an expert in the field.