- Got Sheet
- Posts
- Do You Know All These?
Do You Know All These?
Top 5 Essential Spreadsheet Skills Every Professional Should Master
Eamonn Cottrell
November 13, 2024
HEADLINES
Did you check out my free Google Sheets video course yet? Here are each of the video links:
Got Sheet is brought to you by beehiiv. Newsletters made simple.
Check them out for 20% off your first three months…try beehiiv now.
THE 5 BEST SPREADSHEET SKILLS YOU SHOULD KNOW
Formulas, Functions and Keyboard Shortcuts
Maybe a no-brainer, but I’m still learning new uses and combinations for built-in functions.
Just yesterday after a little bit of searching, I was able to DRASTICALLY simplify some search functionality by combining the FILTER, BYROW, LAMBDA, ISNUMBER and SEARCH functions.
What I thought would take many lines and named ranges ended up taking ONE line of text for the full function.
=FILTER(Table1,BYROW(Table1,LAMBDA(row,OR(ISNUMBER(SEARCH(D2,row))))))And in terms of a time saver, I’ve never regretted the time spent looking up and learning keyboard shortcuts. It’s my favorite hack in any program.
Data Analysis and Visualization
Data’s great, but if we don’t know how to properly break it down to solve whatever business problem we’ve got, it’s not very useful.
Add some charts and visualizations into the mix and you can take lifeless data and turn it into meaningful insights that ordinary people can easily understand.
Lookup Functions
XLOOKUP is the main event these days, but there are other lookup functions as well. If you only learn one, just focus on XLOOKUP.
These can help pull information out of big data sets really easily; minimizing the time it takes to analyze and pull insights for your work.
Automations
If you find yourself repeating tasks over and over again, manually entering a lot of data or just wasting time doing very mundane things, you probably have a great opportunity to automate something.
Sometimes this is as simple as setting up an Apps SCRIPT or VBA macro. At other times, it can be helpful to stitch together a third-party service that works with your spreadsheet or the exported data from it.
Collaboration and Sharing
Both Google Sheets and Microsoft Excel allow for collaboration and sharing.
I have often touted Sheets as the simpler option here, but Excel has come a long way too. Sheets, of course, is natively online and makes cloud-sharing and real time collaboration extremely easy to setup and use.
Excel, though, is able to be shared worked on together through their OneDrive service.
Learn without limits on Coursera.
Google’s latest course is Prompting Essentials. Learn to give clear and specific instructions to generative AI in 5 easy steps.
Enroll here.
NEXT STEPS
Whenever you’re ready, here’s how I can help:
Business tech stack (FREE)
My recommendations for software and tools I use to create content and run my online business.Sponsor Got Sheet
Got Sheet teaches business operators, teachers and entrepreneurs how to get good at spreadsheets. Interested in sponsoring an issue or a series of Got Sheet newsletters? Reach out to get more information.Personal budget tool
As a Got Sheet subscriber, I want you to have a 75% discount on the personal budget I built 10+ years ago and am still using to this day.
Reply