What Excel Skills Are Most Valuable For Finance and Accounting - Quora

10/12/2017 What Excel Skills Are Most Valuable for Finance and Accounting?
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Financial Accounting Microsoft Excel Accounting Skills Finance Is learning Excel a valuable skill to have?
What Excel skills are most valuable for nance and Why is The Wire not published a year-wise balance
sheet of Jay Shah's company?
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How much does finance and accounting depend on
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40 Answers
What college courses have proven most valuable for
jobs in finance?
Peter Lynch, VP Private Equity; formerly at JPMorgan and Rabobank; founded
ASimpleModel.com
How much accounting do you need to excel in a
Answered May 26
career as a finance professional?
ASimpleModel.com has a video series introducing Excel in the context of
What is the most valuable skill that I can learn that will
nancial models with the objective of getting someone new to Excel up to speed
make me a lot of money?
as quickly as possible. The content is organized as follows:
Formatting
Developing Formulas
Keyboard Shortcuts & Navigation
Pasting Shortcuts & Paste Special
Habits to Avoid
Essential Date Functions
VLOOKUP and HLOOKUP
INDEX + MATCH
Once you get through these basics, the focus shifts to building models, but
keyboard shortcuts and Excel formulas are explained in these videos as well.
Example: Three Statement Model Part I
While the Excel for Models series focuses on the absolute basic requirements,
there are plenty of additional formulas and tricks that can be very helpful. Some
of my favorites follow:
Quickly Format Cells With F5:
posted: Excel Trick: Quickly Format Cells With F5
Using F9 to Audit Formulas:
https://www.quora.com/What-Excel-skills-are-most-valuable-for-finance-and-accounting 1/11
10/12/2017 What Excel Skills Are Most Valuable for Finance and Accounting? - Quora
Is learning Excel a valuable skill to have?
Why is The Wire not published a year-wise balance

Is Power BI a valuable skill for someone in finance?
What skills should the perfect finance/accounting

analyst have?
How does having SQL as a skill set help in core

posted: Excel: Using F9 to Audit Formulas accounting or finance jobs?

Exclude Zeros When Taking an Average in Excel:
Excel?

jobs in finance?

posted: Exclude Zeros When Taking an Average in Excel
Sum a Specic Number of Cells with =SUM and = OFFSET:
posted: Excel Trick: Sum a Specic Number of Cells (template available)
Using CountIf with an Asterisk:
posted: Excel Hack: =CountIf with an Asterisk (template available)

Extract NonBlank or NonZero Values from an Array:

analyst have?


Excel?

jobs in finance?

posted: Excel: Extract NonBlank or NonZero Values from an Array (template What is the most valuable skill that I can learn that will
available) make me a lot of money?
Excel Trick: SumProduct & Double Minus ("--"):
posted: Excel Trick: SumProduct & Double Minus ("--") (template available)
A couple additional links that do not have video:
Excel: =XIRR vs =IRR
Excel: =OFFSET() vs. =CHOOSE()
Commission Structure & HLOOKUP Practice

7.3k Views 26 Upvotes
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Related Questions More Answers Below
Why is The Wire not published a year-wise balance sheet of Jay Shah's company?
What skills should the perfect finance/accounting analyst have?

Rob Donnelly, PhD Student at Stanford GSB
Updated May 22
So much of this is going to vary job by job, but here are some of the core skills I
think are needed to be able to be a strong Excel user: Why is The Wire not published a year-wise balance
VLOOKUP. Make sure that they also know how to do this when looking
up based on more than one eld (e.g. First Name, Last Name, Month).
INDEX and MATCH. Vlookups are a bit faster to write, but index match
gives you a lot more exibility in certain situations. What skills should the perfect finance/accounting
analyst have?
Separating input data from calculations. Each input data source should
be pasted in directly as received, all calculations should be done in
other sheets (using vlookup/index match to pull in the data)
IF, AND, OR every user needs to know how to use these basic Excel?
conditional logic formulas.
Pivot Tables jobs in finance?
Named Ranges How much accounting do you need to excel in a

Making charts that combine multiple types (e.g. a line graph overlayed
on a bar chart, clustered bar charts, ) make me a lot of money?
Array Formulas (e.g. SUM of prot on all deals worth more than $1m usd
where the buyer is from China)
Custom number formats (e.g. making 3000000 show up as "$3.0

million")
Conditional Formatting
Special types of paste (paste link, paste values, paste formats, etc)
Doing almost everything with keyboard shortcuts
Text-To-Columns (To parse at text les)

Paramdeep Singh, Ex IBanker and Finance Trainer @ www.edupristine.com/ca

Answered Apr 15, 2013 Upvoted by Govind Rathi, MBA Finance, Department of
Management Sciences, University of Pune
We are running a fairly popular program (Trained ~1000 people in the last year)
on Financial Modeling in Excel. From my experience of the course, I think the
following skills are quite useful for Finance Professionals:
Structured Thinking: Financial Models require you to think straight
and convert your thought process into Excel Spreadsheets. So the rst
part that should be taught is structured thinking. This can be done
through exercises on Market Size Estimation, Marketing Funnel,
Deriving the right drivers for Revenue, Costs, etc. Once the student
starts thinking in a structured manner, the models automatically start
rolling out. When you create the models, they should have a logical ow
Logically Breaking the Model into Smaller Parts
Logically Deriving the numbers
Mastering Excel as a Tool: Since mostTrying

of thetotime
regain internet
would beconnection...
spent in Hide this message.
implementing the model in Excel, unless you are very comfortable with
the tool, you would take too long navigating the tool rather than Is learning Excel a valuable skill to have?
creating the model. Excel Shortcuts, knowing advanced functions, the
referencing framework, etc. play a big role in helping you quickly
implement your thoughts in Excel.

analyst have?


Excel?

jobs in finance?

Correct Formatting: Other people would read your model and come to
some decisions. If your model is not legible (fonts, results, spreadsheet,
navigability, etc.), the model is not going to be useful. You should learn
all kind of formatting in Excel.
Analysis: As a nance professional your job is to analyze data and

come to conclusions. Each step of analysis and its implementation
(Ratios, Valuation, etc.) should be taught to Finance Professionals.
Dash-board Building: Final results need to be presented. Most of the
times, even good models are rendered useless unless they have a good
dashboard to highlight the results to the end user.


analyst have?


Excel?

jobs in finance?

We do release a lot of free open source Financial Models, so that students can
learn this art. You can get the same from: What is the most valuable skill that I can learn that will
Financial Modeling of Zynga
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Daniel A. Chen, CPA, CA, Wharton MBA - Co-Founder @ Bucksprout

Answered Apr 25, 2013
I really like Rob Donnelly's answer, so I'm only going to add to it here:
Don't forget VLOOKUP's little brother, HLOOKUP.
Tips and tricks to make data tangible can be a life saver. For example,
copying and pasting values can clear problematic and unncessary
formatting.
If you have data with leading zeroes, you can eliminate those by
multiplying all cell contents by 1 (use copy paste-special, multiply).
You can also extract data using the functions RIGHT / MID / LEFT /
FIND. This is super useful for parsing out data if you haven't already
done it as part of an import.
Import raw CSV data or tab delimited text by opening in Excel and
choosing where Excfel should segment the data into columns.
Pivot tables are super powerful, and although Rob Donnelly mentions
them above, I would overweight time spent with them - they are
awesome for organizing data, sorting, ltering, and for conducting
sensitivity analyses.
Typical nancial functions such as NPV, IRR, PV.
When building a P&L or balance sheet, use negative numbers to denote

credits, and positive numbers to denote debits. This way, all you have
to do is sum your debits and credits and they will always balance out to
zero. You also never have to remember 'which sign' interest income
should be... if it's income, it's a credit! :)
Finally, learn basic macro creation / editing to save time and automate
frequently repeated tasks.
52.6k Views 72 Upvotes Answer requested by Ashish Gourav
Asen Gyczew, studied at Warsaw School of Economics

Answered Aug 24 Is learning Excel a valuable skill to have?
When it comes to modeling you should be able do the following things: Why is The Wire not published a year-wise balance
1. Know how to create a nancial model that generates nancial
statements such as prot and loss, balance sheet cash ow that are
consistent. Have a look at presentation showing how to do it step by Is Power BI a valuable skill for someone in finance?
step
analyst have?
2. Know how to create simplied nancial / business models on the
basis of main KPIs and drivers. Have a look at examples of such model How does having SQL as a skill set help in core
for consulting business , restaurant , retail , e-commerce . Have a accounting or finance jobs?
look at presentation modeling oine businesses How much does finance and accounting depend on
Excel?
3. Learn not to use the mouse. You can do most of the things with
shortcuts that save you tones of time. Below my favorite pick for PC What college courses have proven most valuable for
jobs in finance?
(Mac is not the best choice for Excel freaks)
a. Ctrl + C to copy and Ctrl +V to paste it
b. Shift + Space to mark the whole row. After you mark it you can
remove it by pressing Ctrl + - or add a new row by pressing Ctrl+ make me a lot of money?
Shift + +
c. Ctrl + Space to mark the whole column. After you mark it you can
remove it by pressing Ctrl + - or add a new row by pressing Ctrl+
Shift + +
d. Ctrl + 1 to get the menu to format the cells.
e. Alt + E + S to get the menu to paste special the sta. You can move
even further i.e. presss V to paste values and i.e. E to transpose
the whole columns
4. Most things in Excel you can achieve with 3 functions:
a. VLOOKUP. The most versatile function you can imagine. You can
assignSearch
categories using it,people,
for questions, replaceand
complicated
topics Ifs and merge data. Sign In
Have a look at some movies showing how to use the VLOOKUP,
MATCH to analyze - these are typical analyses done by Business
Analyst Related Questions
b. PIVOT table. You can fast analyze data using them and go deeper
into data if there is a need for it.
c. SUMIFS, COUNTIFS - those functions are perfect substitute for

Pivot Table. not that elegant but very versatile.
d. Other useful are: SUMPRODUCT, IFERROR, CONCATENATE, MOD,

LEN, RIGHT, LEFT, INDIRECT, OFFSET, YEAR, MONTH, DAY,
ROUNDDOWN, MATCH, HLOOKUP , RAND, MAX, MIN, CORREL,
IF. How and when to use them you can nd in my presentation
Essential Excel for Business Analyst .
e. Excel has also a lot of useful built-in elements: Slicer, Pivot Charts,
Data Analysis Tool Pack, Relative addresses, Slicers, Formats, Data
Validation
5. Use colors to put everything into orders. I use colors to make the
Excel more clear and easy to read. I use for formulas white and for
things fed in manually the blue color. In this way I know what are the
drivers of a specic analysis (the sta in blue). Sometimes I also use
orange to mark things from dierent sheets. Have a look at analysis that
is using such coding
6. Master sheet. For bigger analysis it is worth putting a master sheet that
has a table of content with links to all sheets in the le. In this way the
le is more easy to navigate. In every sheet I also put a back word with
hyperlink to the Master sheet. In this way I am 2 clicks away from any
sheet no matter how big the le. Have a look at analysis that is using
such Master sheet Trying to regain internet connection... Hide this message.
7. Learn to make analysis in Excel that will reect the business logic.
Have a look at the presentation where you have some examples : Is learning Excel a valuable skill to have?

Hope this info helps :) sheet of Jay Shah's company?
Take care What is the most useless talent/skill?
1.2k Views 9 Upvotes Is Power BI a valuable skill for someone in finance?

Eric Andrews, studied Finance at Tulane University (2013) analyst have?
Answered Oct 2
As an accountant / nance employee youre going to be using only a small accounting or finance jobs?
portion of Excels functionality, but in heavy volume.
Excel?
In business, about 80% of your work will come from 20% of the
functionality of the Microsoft Excel. What college courses have proven most valuable for
jobs in finance?
Things like formatting, sorting & ltering, analyzing data and navigating Excel
without the mouse are going to be your bread and butter. career as a finance professional?
My suggestion would be to take a business-focused Excel course, rather than a What is the most valuable skill that I can learn that will
comprehensive course. make me a lot of money?
The core skills of a competent business Excel user are something like:
Formatting & basic formulas
Mouse-free excel navigation
Vlookups & conditional statements
Data analysis - ltering, sorting, and analyzing data
Data visualization - tables, charts, and dual axis charts
What-if-analysis
Pivot tables
If you can do these things, youll outperform 95% of people in the workplace.
Best way to start learning these skills would be to go to youtube / google with
this list, or look for an online course.
If youre interested in a course, Id recommend the following business-

focused course focused on mastering the 20% of functions that make 80%
of Excel work.
Become an Excel Power User in 2.5 Hours
Hope this helps!

590 Views 6 Upvotes
Paul Spiteri, Excelvids.com owner | Technologist | CPA

Answered Mar 27
There are already a few great answers to this question already, so I thought Id
take a dierent slant - where possible Ill stay away from core functionality and
focus on three areas that I see constantly lacking in the workforce -
Best practice design principles
Being a good designer is a bit like singing i the shower - most of us are not quite
as good as we think we are. In lieu of natural talent, follow some proven design
principles. There are three books on this topic that I think are fantastic -
Information Dashboard Design by Stephen Few. If youre only after one

book, this is the one to buy.
The Non-designers Design Book by Robin Williams
How to Make an Impact by Jon Moon

Best practice spreadsheet structure
Excel will work better if you structure your spreadsheet the right way and this
falls into two broad categories -
Dont try to cram everything onto one sheet / tab. Instead, have sheet of Jay Shah's company?
dedicated sheets for each of: outputs; calculations; setups information;

data, and; instructions. Not every spreadsheet will have all of these
elements and sometimes its OK to bend the rules and have one sheet do Is Power BI a valuable skill for someone in finance?
more than one thing, but this is a good starting point. What skills should the perfect finance/accounting
analyst have?
Make sure your data looks like data. This is a little dicult to describe,
but it generally looks like a table with nothing else but the base level of How does having SQL as a skill set help in core
information. No subtotals, no totals. Headers at the top and / or left but
none in or amongst the data. No empty spaces / column / rows in the How much does finance and accounting depend on
data. And one type of data in each row or column. Excel?

Learn keyboard shortcut keys jobs in finance?
Such a huge productivity gain can be had by using Excels keyboard shortcuts. How much accounting do you need to excel in a
There are loads of them I wont go through them all here but some of my career as a finance professional?
favourites are - What is the most valuable skill that I can learn that will
Repeat a previous action quickly with the F4 key
Navigate large spreadsheets quickly with ctrl-arrow (and shift-ctrl-

arrow) shortcuts
Switch between open spreadsheets using ctrl-tab
Use F4 to cycle between absolute cell reference types
OK so these may not sound Earth-shattering, but what I can say is that it
probably only takes is in-depth knowledge of about 20 or so Excel functions to
put you ahead of the your peers in the workplace but knowing best practice
design, best practice spreadsheet structure and keyboard short cuts is the
dierence between being OK with Excel and adding true value in the workplace.
Incidentally, Ive begin documenting these and other aspects of working with
Excel at a set I call Excelvids . There is lots of free content so there may be no
harm in taking a look.
Happy Excel-ing!
Rishabh Ladha, Venture Capitalist turned Entrepreneur

Answered Mar 19, 2013 Upvoted by Pranav Shastri, PGDM Finance & Small Business
Advice, Welingkars (2016)
Rob Donnelly does a great job of putting together a list of core excel skills that
are a must have for any strong excel user. I'd like to add some functions/ best
practices that I have found to be useful from a nance and a/c point of view.
General Formatting- Hardcoded inputs to be in blue, calculated elds
in black, assumptions in red/green (These are usually used). I prefer
keeping the entire background white and shading assumption cells
with grey, table headings in blue etc.
Number Formatting- Eg. All the numbers in my model maybe in

millions and I don't want to clutter it with all those 0's. One way is to
divide everything with by 1000000, or you can go to formats (ctrl+1)
and set custom formats to 0,, (each comma represents 1000). Another
example is changing custom format to 0.0"x" and all your ratios appear
in the form of 1.1x etc. There are several options for custom number
formatting which can make your life very easy and your model clean.
There is another cool trick everyone should know. If you don't want to
write 1000000 everytime you want to write a million, just write 1e6 and
you're good. You save time and reduce the probability of making an
error while counting 0's as long as you know that a million has six 0's.
6.5 million is 6.5e6 and done.
Breakup the nancial model in 3 parts- Input Sheets, Processing Sheets

and Output sheets. Ideally, all your inputs should be in the rst section.
Thereafter everything should be driven by a formula.
Draw your nancial model on a piece of paper- I nd this extremely
useful as it helps me think about how I want my model to look and how
I should approach it. There will be many small parts to a sound
nancial model and its easy to get lost. So know which sheet you want What is the most useless talent/skill?
to build rst. Keep room for more assumptions as you may end up Is Power BI a valuable skill for someone in finance?
adding things as you go. Don't put too much stu on one spreadsheet.
Keep Placeholders for all your assumptions- all of them. You never analyst have?
know which variable your boss may ask you to change. You could spend
hours trying to x your model if you hardcoded something that needs accounting or finance jobs?
to get changed. And scenarios change all the time. That's the whole
point of building a model in the rst place. Excel?
Writing formulae- Ensure your formulae can be dragged across all rows What college courses have proven most valuable for
and columns easily. Learn how to quickly reference lock using F4 and jobs in finance?
jump between value and formula using F2. Test your formula before
dragging- easy way is Alt+ M+ V (or go to Fomrulas--> Evaluate career as a finance professional?
Formula).
Needless to say, you should know what you're building- in theory. make me a lot of money?
Building a P&L, BS and CF statement while ensuring they all tie up can
be tough. So think through each line item, and how it will aect the
other sheets. Eg. A xed asset purchase will aect my cash ow and my
balance sheet. Its depreciation will aect my balance sheet and my P&L.
Remember to pass the right entries. Keep a check box in the BS to
ensure your Assets and Liabilities are matching.
Moving forward, a lot will depend on what you're trying to build and
what's the ultimate outcome. Is it a plain forecast, are you trying to
value a company using dcf etc. Standard templates are available online.
I suggest you look at them for help, but build your own models as much
as you can.
Output- Should be neat, easy to read and understand. Your assumptions

should be close to your output sheet to see how the variable are
behaving. Try using the Camera feature to do this. Try and build graphs
to display trends (no one is going to read every line in the model)
There are lots of nance functions which are beyond the scope of this
answer. They allow you to do almost any calculation required.
I'll update my answer in case I remember something else.
Excel is one of the most amazing tools know to mankind. Once you get a hang of
it, it's a lot of fun.
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10/12/2017 What Excel Skills Are Most Valuable for Finance and Accounting?

Trying to regain internet connection... Hide this message.

Promoted by Tipalti Is Power BI a valuable skill for someone in finance?

Keyboard Shortcuts & Navigation

Pasting Shortcuts & Paste Special

Essential Date Functions

VLOOKUP and HLOOKUP

Quickly Format Cells With F5:

posted: Excel Trick: Quickly Format Cells With F5

Using F9 to Audit Formulas:

Trying to regain internet connection... Hide this message.

Is learning Excel a valuable skill to have?

Why is The Wire not published a year-wise balance

What is the most useless talent/skill?

Is Power BI a valuable skill for someone in finance?

What skills should the perfect finance/accounting

How does having SQL as a skill set help in core

How much does finance and accounting depend on

What college courses have proven most valuable for

How much accounting do you need to excel in a

posted: Exclude Zeros When Taking an Average in Excel

Sum a Specic Number of Cells with =SUM and = OFFSET:

posted: Excel Trick: Sum a Specic Number of Cells (template available)

Using CountIf with an Asterisk:

Trying to regain internet connection... Hide this message.

posted: Excel Hack: =CountIf with an Asterisk (template available)

What is the most useless talent/skill?

Is Power BI a valuable skill for someone in finance?

What skills should the perfect finance/accounting

How does having SQL as a skill set help in core

How much does finance and accounting depend on

What college courses have proven most valuable for

How much accounting do you need to excel in a

Excel Trick: SumProduct & Double Minus ("--"):

A couple additional links that do not have video:

Excel: =XIRR vs =IRR

Excel: =OFFSET() vs. =CHOOSE()

Commission Structure & HLOOKUP Practice

As simple as a spreadsheet, as powerful as a database.

Related Questions More Answers Below

Is learning Excel a valuable skill to have?

What is the most useless talent/skill?

What skills should the perfect finance/accounting analyst have?

Trying to regain internet connection... Hide this message.

Named Ranges How much accounting do you need to excel in a

Custom number formats (e.g. making 3000000 show up as "$3.0

Doing almost everything with keyboard shortcuts

Text-To-Columns (To parse at text les)

Paramdeep Singh, Ex IBanker and Finance Trainer @ www.edupristine.com/ca

Logically Breaking the Model into Smaller Parts

Logically Deriving the numbers

Mastering Excel as a Tool: Since mostTrying

Is Power BI a valuable skill for someone in finance?

What skills should the perfect finance/accounting

How does having SQL as a skill set help in core

How much does finance and accounting depend on

What college courses have proven most valuable for