Excel Top Tip #5 - Ask and learn

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Hello

This month we’re bringing you something a little different. 

While being an Excel master is important for your own personal and professional development, so too is ensuring everyone else within your team is using the programme efficiently and to the benefit of your business. 

Your peers should be actively encouraged to share their Excel challenges and be given a forum for open exchange of solutions to the problems. To help with this, why not host a training session or Q&A to bring about discussion on the current challenges your team face within Excel, opening the floor for improved collaboration and more efficiency moving forward.   

Here are our top tips on how to get the most from an Excel Masters training session: 

• Let everyone know – inform the team this is going to take place, letting them know you’ll be asking them for their help to pull it together! 

• Put it to the floor – about a week before the training session, bring out the questions that will drive your schedule, by asking the team to submit their Excel questions and challenges

• Have some backups – on the rare chance no-one comes forward, have a set of backup questions to present in the session. Useful examples include: How confident are you in dealing with CSV files? What most scares you about dealing with more than 100 rows of data in Excel? What one process would you automate? 

• Find relevant resources – Give yourself time to source videos or experts (internally/externally) for efficient training of some of the most common issues that arise 

• Hold a vote – as each question is raised, ask people to raise their hand if this is an existing challenge for them. Keep score to see which issue is most common amongst the team, or use a platform like Sli.do for easy counting of votes

• Share best practice – during the session, create a standard or accepted process which colleagues can use in the future to raise questions about common tasks in Excel 

• Be open to discussion – let everyone know that if they want to discuss their Excel question one-to-one, you’re available. This makes sure everyone’s needs and ways of working get met

Implementing these steps will help identify knowledge gaps, find solutions to common pain points and repetitive tasks, and help build Excel masters. 

Thank you,

The StatementReader Team