How I use Excel at work

I currently breathe, eat, and sleep excel.  And still I don’t know every trick this program has to offer.  But I am completely amazed with the things that we can do and populate in this foreign formula obsessed spreadsheet.

I work for a whole sale company and I am in sales, so everything we do is through excel.  For example, we write up orders to our factories in an excel order form, it has drop down lists, and formulas already populated once you enter a quantity and a prepack amount.  I mean this is a too smart for smart people order form.  But this is the least of my excel experience…

Every Monday morning I have to run sales reports, and let me tell you, these reports are intense.  I personally, before I started with this company, only used excel for your basics : charts, some simple formulas and pictures and lists, etc…; but when I started in my new position, I got frighten on how intense my new company used excel.  I didn’t think I would last because my skill level (which I thought was a ‘7’ in a scale of 1-10, but really a ‘3’) I was nothing compared to where I needed to be.

So my sales reports are run from a ‘sumif’ formula, and tons of others.  I am able to read the formulas now, and understand them; but can’t create them just yet.  But the report runs like this:  I upload an excel format raw data (this shows how my items are selling currently for the past week on their floor) from my customers site (i.e. Target), then copy and paste the data into another excel file which is an accumulative file, and save it.  Then I open my customer’s sales report excel sheet (Target) and change a formula in a specific cell to pull information for the current week, and then ungroup some columns and make sure that the formula in that column seems accurate (this formula is the sumif formula that pulls information from my raw data report and enters it automatically in my sales report) and pretty much my sales report file is complete.

This usually takes about 10 minutes for it to be completed through excel.  If we were to do this manually, it will take me hours to search for the data on my own.  But someone, excel savvy (my boss – hence why he is my boss) managed to create this sales report file that does it automatically for us (with a little bit of human input).  Now I only hope to be able to make my excel level from a ‘3’ to a real ‘7’ after this class.

-Bianca Moura