No one denies that Excel is incredibly powerful software. However, learning to use its more advanced features is not easy at all. With that in mind, we've tracked down the top ten Excel gurus that can help you master advanced Excel features more easily.
In the past, we've recommended places where you can learn the basics of Excel. 8 Tips to Learn Excel Fast 8 Tips to Learn Excel Fast Not as comfortable with Excel as you'd like? Get started with simple tips for adding formulas and managing data. Follow this guide and you'll be up to speed in no time. Read more . With these basics covered, you'll be able to use Excel's main data store. From Punch Cards to Holograms:A Brief History of Data Storage From Punch Cards to Holograms:A Brief History of Data Storage Let's look at some of the technologies that are shaping modern data storage, as well as where we go from here. Read More We've also listed resources for discovering Excel formulas. Need help with Excel formulas? 7 resources to check out Need help with Excel formulas? 7 Resources to Reference Excel is the gold standard of spreadsheets. If you must use Excel and yet become familiar with it, these resources will quickly introduce you to the basics and beyond. Read More 8 Types of Excel charts and graphs and when to use them are easier to understand than text and numbers. Charts are a great way to visualize numbers. We show you how to create charts in Microsoft Excel and when to best use which type. Read more.
But if you want to expand your knowledge, you'll need trusted Excel specialists who are willing to share their deepening knowledge of this program with you.
The following ten Excel gurus fit this description perfectly. Each guru regularly publishes step-by-step tutorials that guide you through these more advanced features of Excel that you might otherwise be struggling with for weeks.
Purna Duggirala (aka, “Chandoo”) is a minor celebrity in Excel circles. Since 2004, Chandoo has been regularly sharing what she learns while working with Excel. Her site, which aims to "make you awesome at Excel," now gets over 1.5 million visitors per month, and is Chandoo's full-time project.
On the site she'll find a popular Excel podcast, a thriving forum, and a 75,000-person mailing list. Among the main content of the site, you will find guides to analyze half a million customer complaints, to master pivot tables (which we have previously discussed How to Use an Excel Pivot Table for Data Analysis How to Use an Excel Pivot Table for Analysis Pivot Table is one of the most powerful tools in the Excel 2013 repertoire. It is frequently used for big data analysis. Follow our step-by-step demo to learn more. Read More).
Much of the content on the Mynda Treacy site is available free of charge. It consists of detailed Excel tutorials accompanied by screenshots and videos to really dig into the lessons. These tutorials include more basic lessons, such as selecting multiple items from a data validation list, and advanced tutorials on Power Query reformats.
On the site, she'll also find a range of high-quality webinars by other Excel professionals that she can stream at no cost.
Having been working with Excel for two decades, Bill Jelen (aka “Mr. Excel”) is a true oracle of this software. But if that's not enough, the huge Excel forum on the Jelen site hosts an army of Excel experts to answer any of your questions.
His topics cover everything imaginable, from the benefits of Power Pivots, to sorting out messy data. And if you're more of a visual learner, Jelen occasionally hosts webinars and posts screenshot videos on his YouTube channel.
ExcelIsFun is the great Excel channel on YouTube run by Mike Girvin. With over 2,000 Excel video tutorials, this is a channel everyone who regularly works with Excel should subscribe to. Most of the videos are 7-15 minutes long and very easy to follow (as long as you already have a basic understanding of Excel).
If you've never seen Girvin's channel (and his energetic teaching style) before, the variety of videos can be overwhelming. Fortunately, he's sorted them into descriptive playlists to help you find your way. For example, you can find 68 videos to help you master the SUMPRODUCT function and 139 videos to help you master VLOOKUP.
Jon Peltier has been working with Excel since 1995 and is an expert in the use of Virtual Basic for Applications (VBA) and Visual Basic. That is why he has been recognized as a Most Valuable Professional (MVP) by Microsoft every year since 2001. The skills he teaches enable Excel "to be integrated with PowerPoint, Word, and other applications to complement its reporting and analysis capabilities."
The extensive Peltier site, PeltierTech.com focuses on a wide range of Excel functions, but specializes in advanced tutorials “To achieve graphical effects that, at first glance, seem impossible.”. These include tutorials for bar line charts, pivot charts, and pivot charts.
Debra Dagleish's post, the regularly updated blog on Contextures, focuses on detailed and relatively advanced Excel tutorials. These extend underused features like using macroless sheet selectors, as well as fixing common problems like VLOOKUP sorting issues.
In addition to a host of tutorials, you'll also find a host of free Excel file downloads and video tutorials to help you master these more advanced features.
Having written over 50 books (including the Excel Bible series) and hundreds of articles, Walkenback has surely earned the title “Excel Guru”. Not surprisingly, the web of him., Spreadsheet is one of the most popular Excel sites out there.
Walkenbach's blog covers many Excel updates and issues that he may want to explore further. More relevant to this article, however, is the long list of Excel tips available. These topics range from playing MP3 files from Excel to creating a spreadsheet map. There's even a download page, with sections specifically for developers and Excel add-ins.
35,000 people consider Dinesh Kumar Takyar Excel's YouTube channel worth subscribing to, and many of his videos receive hundreds of thousands of views. The goal of the channel is to teach you how to use Excel and VB proficiently, with many of the topics coming from Takyar's own students and viewers.
Straightforward style gets right to the point, with easy-to-follow screen recordings that introduce you to a host of new features. Some of Takyar's most popular tutorials include transferring data from one worksheet to another, creating notifications in Excel, and designing a user form.
MyExcelOnline is an amazing resource for learning Excel led by John Michaloudis. Michaloudis has been working with Excel for the past 15 years, and now produces tutorials accompanied by easy-to-follow GIFs and downloadable workbooks. These short tutorials can help you solve "real life business cases" quickly and easily. They range from learning how to connect slicers to multiple pivot tables, to jumping to cell references within a formula.
In addition to these quick tutorials, John also hosts a popular Excel podcast, where other gurus on this list (among many others) have been featured.
The excel blog It's Brad Edgar's way of sharing his enthusiasm for Excel with the rest of the world. His mission is to help Excel users find. "Confidence and reason in their work or business activities." The articles on Edgar's site go above and beyond many of the others on this list. Instead of focusing solely on step-by-step tutorials, he will also be treated to other types of content, such as Excel tips that will make him look smarter than his co-workers..
Even though the blog doesn't update very often, the variety of content types makes it a fascinating blog to follow. And if you need to download sample data to help you with other tutorials, you can also buy some on the site.
The number of things he can do or problems he can solve with Excel is staggering. You can use basic formulas to solve real life problems. 16 Excel Formulas to Help You Solve Real-Life Problems. 16 Excel Formulas to Help You Solve Real-Life Problems. The right tool is half the job. Excel can solve calculations and process data faster than your calculator can. We show you the key Excel formulas and show you how to use them. Read More Visualize your data and make your spreadsheets easy to use with an Excel Dashboard. Visualize your data and make your spreadsheets easy to use with an Excel Dashboard. accessible data A dashboard allows you to present your most important data in an easy-to-digest format. Read More
So no matter what you're trying to accomplish, the combined knowledge of these 10 Excel gurus will certainly be enough to get you there. But there are still tons of great resources that we haven't found, let alone mentioned.
So what Excel resources, and other Excel gurus, would you like to have seen on this list? Where to do you Go solve your Excel problems and learn more about the advanced features of Excel.?
