Build This BEGINNER EXCEL MODEL With Me In Around 15 Minutes!

On the 30 Day Excel Analyst programme, I try to gently reinforce the idea that Excel is a skill. There can be too much focus on knowledge acquisition in the Excel world: learning formulae or VBA syntax, for example. The truth is the best way to get better at Excel is to … do Excel. Here at Tiger, we say, 'Be A Value Creator, Not A Technique Collector'.

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Welcome back to Day 15 of 30 Day Excel Analyst – transforming your analytical skillset in 30 days. Like shooting a basketball, playing the drums or learning to walk, Excel is a skill and, like any skill, it gets better with practice. So, for me, the critical question is now ‘How much new stuff can I learn?’, it’s ‘How can I adopt a mindset that allows me to keep practising?’ This, as we discussed, is why the Excel metaskills are important.

I learn new techniques on a ‘need-to-know’ basis and, even today, know relatively few Excel techniques compared to some practitioners out there. Dynamic array formulae, for example, are almost a complete mystery to me! But, I’m delivering analytical work for clients on a daily basis …

It's this mindset, however, that’s the secret to my (modest) Excel success. Today, we’ll open Excel and try to work through a real-world modelling problem sent in by a viewer right here on YouTube. We’ll work through the process we’ve learned this week starting with planning and conceptualization, identifying inputs, processes and outputs, setting up a helpful model layout then (and only then!) implementing a calculation chain using Excel formulae.

Finally, we’ll look at exploiting Excel models. Once the underlying input-process-output structure is in place, we can unleash one of my Excel secret weapons: data tables. These sound innocuous and, like many things in Excel, feel ‘misnamed’, but are the key to powerful optimization in Excel. I hope you’ll enjoy the session – welcome back to 30 Day Excel Analyst!