It doesn’t matter what you do, or are going to do in your career. Excel is an inevitability.

The degree to which you use Excel, the degree of expertise required where Excel is concerned, and the number of hours you spend staring at Excel might vary, both across careers and within the span of each individual careers. But for most of you – and I’m very tempted to say for all of you – Excel is very much an inevitability.

And the single best resource for learning Excel that I am aware of is Chandoo.org. It’s a wonderfully curated blog, this one, with links for basic, intermediate and advanced users, and the associated YouTube channel is also a great way to learn.

If you know your way around Excel in terms of being acquainted with the basics, I’d heavily recommend going through the top 10 formulas for MS-Excel. You probably will not use all of these formulas all the time, but being familiar with them as a student is certainly recommended.

And from there on in, feel free to jump into whatever specific area catches your fancy. Dashboards, charts, advanced formulas would be my recommendations for intermediate users (and I don’t know enough about Excel to call myself an advanced user!).

Here’s the dirty little secret about Excel: you really learn Excel when you meet a problem you need to solve in the real world. Excel, when taught well, is a lot of fun to learn in the classroom. But the real learning takes place, as I said, in the real world.

And the best compliment I can pay Chandoo is that his posts have often helped me out there in the wild, and not just in the cosy confines of academia. And I am sure his awesome blogs will continue to help me in the future as well!

Chandoo, thank you for your generosity with your mastery in MS-Excel!