The first great truth out there in Microsoft Office land is that Excel is difficult to learn for many employees. 

The second is that nearly all employees that use computers in an organization need Excel.

The third is that most organizations need some sort of employee Excel training.

Excel is deceptively simple to understand, but it can literally take an entire lifetime to master. There are innumerable formulas, tools and options within Excel alone that merit years of study - and the ocean of add-ons that are available online only make your task of learning Excel that much more Herculean. It might be some people's contention that a user doesn't need to learn everything about Excel, and that is true enough.

But knowing what to learn out of all that is available in order to do your job most efficiently is a challenge in itself. Which is why we think that some amount of training, when it comes to Microsoft Excel is pretty much inevitable.

And as with any popular software, there are a ton of options available when it comes to training employees in Excel. Each come with their own pros and cons, and we talk about some of them in what follows.

1. We'll Go Our Own Road, Thank You
   Some people have a healthy dislike of sitting through corporate Excel trainings, and prefer to learn stuff on their own. And that's just fine, because after all, everybody's different. And to be honest, we don't like sitting through them either. The only downside to this (and unfortunately, it's a rather big one) is that until you get to Ninja status in Excel, you're losing out on added productivity. Which might be fine with you, sure, but your firm might not be too kicked about it. Any way you look at it, while self-learning is laudable (and cheap!), it can be the longest route. Trial and error works but without a foundation, it's mostly error. 
   
   
2. Youtube All The Way
   This isn't all that bad an option, actually - especially if you have oodles of time. There are a lot many videos available on Excel these days, not only on Youtube, but all over. Most of them are easily accessible, and proceed at a pace that is id eal for self learning. But even in this case, you're left with the problem of which videos to watch. Figuring this out is a problem in itself, and there is of course the problem of having no one around to resolve your doubts and difficulties, of which, we regret to inform you, there will be plenty. On the other hand, we're still in the Free section of the spectrum. 
   
   
3. Excel For Dummies And Associated Titles
   One potential way around the videos solution is to go along with a suitably heavy tome, and combine it with the videos. This gives you plenty of problems to solve, gives you a ready reckoner in your hands, and leaves you with all those videos as well. Still, in our humble opinion, this doesn't work out quite as well as you'd want it to, because combining two different sources can get a little confusing, especially for a beginner. But is it a step up from the videos only solution. Sure! Wallet damage is of course a little higher than the previous solutions, but hey - no pain, no gain!
   
   
4. Excel Everest
   What Excel Everest manages to do (and forgive us for saying so, but it does do it rather well) is combine all of the earlier solutions in one comprehensive package that works in, well, Excel itself. And which is why we think it's such a good idea. Carefully paced, sequentially laid out, loads of problems to solve and best of all with lots and lots of links to videos on Youtube that we think work best - Excel Everest is a training module that should work out just fine for most of you. It comes at a price, to be sure, but hey - most good things in life do!
   
   
5. One-on-one Lessons and Classroom Training
   If you can afford it, it might be the best way to go, you know, depending on if you have a good teacher. Corporate Excel trainings, however, are excessively costly. And like many corporate trainings, they don't always get the best reviews.
   

Corporate Excel Training

If you are an office worker, you probably use Excel already. Even if it happens to be an office that you run out of your garage, you probably make use of the world’s most popular spreadsheet software in one way or the other. Mom and pop grocery stores use it, as do Investment Banks all across the world (should we blame Excel for the global financial meltdown? Maybe... I bet a fair share of those derivative models have seen the world of Excel).

Still, it never hurts to go over the basics of how Excel can be put to work in the office...

At its simplest form, Excel is a place to hold numbers in an organized fashion. If you need to prepare a simple table showing how many projects each person in your team has completed over the last eight months, Excel can do it for you. If you need to prepare a cash flow statement that will impress a prospective investor enough for her to put the moolah in your start-up,  Excel’s the tool for you. And in either case, you don’t need a rocket science degree to type a number and hit enter. 

Or, if your audience is going to panic upon seeing rows and rows of numbers, bedazzle them with charts instead. Excel is a surprisingly powerful way to tell a story, and it is being increasingly used to do just that.

It works with just about every other kind of software: Did you just get a rather large, cumbersome set of numbers in (of all things!) a notepad file? Or perhaps somebody sent you last year’s bonus list in something that calls itself a ‘csv’ file. If you want to make sense of that jumbled up mass of data, Excel can help you. 

It pivots your life around: Excel has some impressive tools that can help you traverse oceans of data in virtually seconds. Two especially neat tricks that Excel keeps up its capacious sleeves are called ‘filters’ and ‘pivot tables’. In the days to come, we’ll wax lyrical about both of them; for now, let’s just say that these features can shorten those long hours of overtime into literally joyous minutes.

It’s loaded with statistical tools: You have numbers, but you need sense. Excel is the alchemist in the middle. It helps you apply various kinds of statistical tools (different kinds of distributions, measures of dispersion and central tendencies and what-have-you) to your data, and unravel the many secrets within. And this, faster and quicker than most other software packages out there.

Excel has been around for a long time, and it gets more powerful and capable with each new iteration. It’s installed on pra ctically every office workstation the world over, and in the days to come we’ll tell you how to put it to optimum use. Stay tuned, and enjoy the ride!

Corporate Excel Training