Sandton: Many businesses have employees who are considered the Excel experts in their departments.
They know formulas. They build PivotTables. They produce monthly reports. Colleagues turn to them when a spreadsheet goes wrong.
But there is an important question businesses should now be asking.
Are those employees advanced in the Excel they learned years ago — or are they keeping pace with the Excel available today?
CAG Executive Question of the Week
How much productive time could your experienced Excel users save if they replaced older spreadsheet methods with newer ways of analysing, preparing and reporting data?
Microsoft Excel has changed considerably.
The challenge is that many experienced users have not had a reason to change with it.
Experience Does Not Always Mean Modern Skills
Someone who has worked with Excel for ten or fifteen years may be highly capable.
But experience can also create habits.
A report that has been prepared the same way every month for five years may still work perfectly well.
That does not necessarily mean it is the most efficient way to produce it.
Employees may still be:
- Copying and pasting data between worksheets.
- Using older lookup techniques where newer alternatives are available.
- Manually preparing recurring reports.
- Repeating data-cleaning processes every month.
- Building complicated formulas that newer Excel functionality could simplify.
- Spending valuable time restructuring information before they can analyse it.
None of these necessarily indicates poor Excel skills.
They may simply indicate that the employee’s Excel knowledge has not kept pace with the application.
“One of the risks with Excel is that a process can work for years, so nobody questions whether there is now a better way to do it.”
Arnold Muscat, Director, College Africa Group
What Has Changed in Modern Excel?
Modern Excel gives experienced users different ways to approach familiar business problems.
Dynamic arrays can change how formulas and results are constructed.
XLOOKUP provides a more flexible approach to many lookup requirements.
Power Query can transform repetitive data preparation from a monthly manual exercise into a repeatable process.
Microsoft 365 continues to introduce functionality that was simply not available when many experienced Excel users originally developed their skills.
This is the focus of College Africa Group’s Advanced Modern Excel training.
The objective is not to discard traditional Excel knowledge.
It is to build on it.
From Spreadsheet Skills to Business Analysis
Modern Excel training should also go beyond learning newer functions.
Businesses increasingly need employees who can take information and use it to support decisions.
That requires more than formulas.
Employees may need to model different outcomes, test assumptions, analyse alternatives and present information in a way that managers can use.
College Africa Group’s Advanced Analysis & Productivity training focuses on this next level of Excel capability, including XLOOKUP, What-If Analysis and business modelling.
The real progression is therefore not:
More Excel functions = more advanced.
It is:
Better Excel skills = better analysis, less manual work and better business decisions.
Power Query Changes the Productivity Discussion
Consider a Finance employee who receives several data files every month.
Before reporting can begin, the employee has to clean the information, remove unnecessary columns, correct formats, combine data and prepare it for analysis.
The employee may be extremely good at doing this.
But the business should still ask why the same preparation work is being repeated every month.
Power Query introduces a different way of thinking about the problem.
Instead of becoming faster at repeating the process, the employee can begin building a process that can be repeated more efficiently.
That distinction matters.
Productivity is not simply doing manual work faster. It is reducing the amount of manual work that needs to be done.
And Then There Is AI
AI adds another layer to modern Excel.
ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot can help users understand formulas, explore approaches to analysis, troubleshoot problems and interpret information.
But AI does not remove the need for Excel knowledge.
In some respects, it makes strong Excel skills more important.
An AI-generated formula may look convincing and still be wrong.
An analysis may sound authoritative while relying on an incorrect assumption.
The employee remains responsible for validating the data, calculation and business conclusion.
AI produces an answer. The employee remains accountable for whether that answer makes sense.
What Should Businesses Be Looking For?
The objective is not to turn every employee into an Excel specialist.
Businesses should identify where stronger or more modern Excel capability would produce a meaningful workplace improvement.
Look for opportunities such as:
- Recurring reports that consume unnecessary time.
- Repetitive data-cleaning and preparation.
- Spreadsheet processes dependent on one experienced employee.
- Complex formulas that are difficult to maintain.
- Manual analysis that could be made more efficient.
- Management information that takes too long to produce.
- Employees using AI-generated formulas without sufficient validation.
These are not simply Excel issues.
They are business productivity issues.
Is It Time to Modernise Your Excel Skills?
Traditional Advanced Excel knowledge remains valuable.
But organisations should not assume that years of Excel experience automatically mean employees are using the most effective tools available today.
College Africa Group’s Advanced Modern Excel training helps experienced users extend their existing knowledge into newer Excel functionality, dynamic formulas, Power Query and modern approaches to working with business data.
For employees who need stronger analytical and decision-support capability, Advanced Analysis & Productivity develops skills in XLOOKUP, What-If Analysis and business modelling.
The goal is not to learn Excel for the sake of learning Excel.
It is to spend less time manipulating spreadsheets and more time using information productively.
Better Business Processes. Stronger Workplace Skills. Smarter AI. Greater Business Productivity.
- Contact details
- Arnold Muscat
- ? +27 (0) 83 778 4903
?? sales@collegeafricagroup.com
Images:
Video:
https://www.youtube.com/@collegeafricaexcelvideotip1434
Are Your Experienced Excel Users Ready for Modern Excel?
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Email sales@collegeafricagroup.com
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Alan Straton
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