Git Sum Skillzzzz
The internet seems to think I can make more money if I’m good at excel. I’m calling its bluff and am busy trying to learn so that I can 1) make more money (duh) 2) quit my current blue collar labor intensive job 3) work from home. I’ve taken four online Finance courses that all used excel and am enrolled in an online MBA starting Fall 2020. I plan to start applying to jobs in summer 2021.
One of the courses I’ve completed is offered through Coursera by Macquarie University. My cursory and uninformed Google search of Macquarie University seems to indicate that it is an Ivy League caliber Australian University. Their Excel Skills for Business is easily one of the best courses I’ve ever taken in any discipline from any institution. That’s a lot of “anys.”
Here’s an example of what I could do in excel before taking the class. Here’s a Net Worth Tracker I put together using some of the tricks I learned in the class. Kelley Starrett of supple leopard fame calls this the “test, retest.” Comparing excel file 1 with excel file 2 clearly demonstrates my improvement.
Handcrafted Bespoke Materials
As a former teacher, I feel especially qualified to review online courses. This class’s format takes you literally keystroke by keystroke through excel’s various functionalities and gives you tons of practice to build muscle memory so that you can actually learn. Having sat through hundreds of hours of long-winded and ultimately fruitless lectures, I commend this class’s creators for eschewing talk and getting down to business.
The professor projects her excel sheet on the screen, tells you what to type, shows you the result, and provides a spreadsheet for each short video so that you can perform the same actions. Here’s a screenshot. In this example, the professor is teaching you how to use excel’s “styles” function for quick formatting. You can see that she’s directly projecting her spreadsheet. You can follow her cursor, perform the same moves, and gain proficiency quickly.
This skill-specific spreadsheet is no anomaly. Every lesson has a unique spreadsheet that is tailored to the skill being taught in that lesson. To prepare materials at this level of detail would be exhaustively time-consuming. The hand-on approach of the class is fantastic, but the level of detail in providing useful materials that actively promote excel skill retention is what makes this class so effective and its creators so worthy of praise.
After each short video, the teachers provide a quick “check for understanding” of a handful of questions to give you extra practice and make sure you learned what they showed you. At the end of the week’s mini lessons, they provide you with a “challenge” activity that has you work with an unformatted excel sheet onto which you will perform the tasks taught to you during the week. This is next level teaching and is so well planned that you HAVE to learn what they’re teaching you.
Below is an example of one of the “challenge” activities. It’s perfectly aligned to the skills taught in the lesson. Notice the painstaking detail in the instructions. There’s also an answer sheet so there is no confusion about your answers. The extra beauty is that you can rinse and repeat this activity multiple times in a week to really master the material.
Concluding Remarks and Unrestrained Praise
Many of the other online courses I’ve taken have message boards riddled with complaints from angry students who have tried a dozen different answers on a test only to still get the answer wrong. The professors teaching those courses are lazy, filmed it once, asked vague questions that yield many answers in many different formats, and probably only check their residuals from Coursera rather than delivering a useful product to us impressionable online matriculators. These ivory tower lowlifes lecture ABOUT excel while showing a PowerPoint with numbers and stats loosely related to the excel functions they are talking about on the screen. This would be like me teaching a course on poetry about bikes in order to teach you how to ride a bike. Idiotic.
Not so with this class. The instructors really took the time to align the videos, the materials, the practice, and the tests. Additionally, the format is comprehensive. You receive video instruction, a written transcript, and can follow along on the same spreadsheet that the professor is using, and then practice on a new spreadsheet.
If you’re trying to learn some excel, this is certainly the place to start. I’m a moron who hardly touched excel before this class, and, now, I can do some stuff. Cheers to the Aussies from Macquarie and to me doing stuff in excel.