I'm trying to train my colleague to feel more confident in Excel
(I am, and I'm not tooting my own horn here, extremely advanced at Excel. my formulae often run through 20+ clauses and autocalculate the entire sheet from one manually entered item. I knew this would be a challenge for me to calibrate because I have a tendency to assume everything I can do well is easy because I have low self esteem, so I was ready to start at the basics - maybe a quick single-clause IF function or a SUMIF if we were feeling fancy)
so I sat down with her yesterday too work through a model sheet I built her, and quickly found she didn't know:
that you could do a basic addition function (=A1+B1), and this delighted and impressed her
that you could click and drag or copy a cell and the formula will recalculate based on its relative position (I started to explain that you can stop it doing that if you want by using a $ in the cell reference and she said no, please stop I think that's too much for me)
and I'm not saying this to shame her because she's not stupid or unwilling to learn, it just threw me because I don't remember ever not having a knowledge of the basics of Excel. Like over the last 8 years I've learnt a LOT and I was very much doing basic mathematical functions on it when I started office work, I know I learnt a lot (and also that I have an instinctive aptitude for the specific logic that Excel uses), but I've always known what Excel is for.
anyway we were talking today and come to find out that she just. did not cover Excel at all in IT at school (we're the same age, btw, this isn't a generational thing)
then I was talking to Sam and it slowly dawned that actually I did an additional short-course GCSE (Business And Communications Studies, which was basically IT for administrators) that was mandatory in my school, so I assumed it was a national core subject like Maths or English or Science. Turns out no, my school were just stuffing their GCSEs (I did 16 GCSEs)
and now I'm reeling cause I'm like OH. OH FUCK. IS THAT WHY EVERYONE'S MICROSOFT SKILLS ARE SO UNBELIEVABLY BASIC????? because I truly did think that everyone my kind of age did at least a few years of Microsoft Office type ICT training in high school.
Did you get taught Excel and other Office programmes at school????
yes, and I know how to do basic Excel formulas
Yes, and I don't know how to do any Excel formulas
I didn't learn in IT class but in other classes, and I know basic formulas
In other classes, and I don't know any formulas
We didn't learn it at school, I learnt elsewhere,and I know how to use formulas
I learnt it elsewhere and I don't know any formulas ( use it for charts/tables)
I have never learnt Excel and don't use it
Voting ended onJun 25, 2025
let me know in the tags how old you are and what country you went to school
(also substitute Numbers/Google Sheets if you don't use Microsoft, we're just talking about any spreadsheet programme)
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