No one denies that Excel is an incredibly powerful piece of software. Yet, learning how to use its more advanced features is far from easy. With that in mind, we’ve tracked down ten top Excel gurus who can help you master the advanced functions of Excel more easily.
In the past, we’ve recommended places where you can learn the basics of Excel. With these basics covered, you’ll be able to use Excel’s main data storage, organization, and manipulation features. We’ve also listed resources for figuring out Excel formulas, and the types of charts you should be using.
But if you want to take your knowledge even further, you’ll need reliable Excel specialists, who are willing to share their growing, in-depth knowledge of this program with you.
The following ten Excel gurus fit this description perfectly. Each guru regularly publishes step-by-step tutorials that walk you through these more advanced Excel features that you could otherwise be wrestling with for weeks.
1. Chandoo
Purna Duggirala (aka, “Chandoo”) is a minor celebrity in Excel circles. Since 2004, Chandoo has been regularly sharing everything he learns while working with Excel. His site, which aims to “make you awesome in Excel” now receives over 1.5m visitorsper month, and is Chandoo’s full-time project.
On the site you’ll find a popular Excel podcast, thriving forum, and a 75,000-strong mailing list. Among the main content on the site, you’ll find guides toanalyzing half a million customer complaints, to mastering pivot tables (which we’ve discussed before).
2. Mynda Treacy
Much of the content on Mynda Treacy’s site is available free of charge. It is made up of in-depth Excel tutorials accompanied by screenshots and videos to really drill home the lessons. These tutorials include more basic lessons, such asselecting multiple items from a data validation list, to advanced tutorials onPower Query reformats.
On the site, you’ll also find a range of top quality webinars run by other Excel professionals that you can stream for no cost.
3. Bill Jelen
Having been working with Excel for two decades, Bill Jelen (aka “Mr Excel”) is a true oracle of this software. But if that’s not enough, the huge Excel forum on Jelen’s site houses an army of Excel experts to answer any of your questions.
His topics cover everything imaginable, from the benefits of Power Pivots, totidying up messy data. And if you’re more of a visual learner, Jelen occasionally hosts webinars, and posts screen capture videos to his YouTube channel.
4. Mike Girvin
ExcelIsFun is the huge Excel YouTube channel run by Mike Girvin. With well over 2,000 Excel video tutorials, this is a channel that anyone who regularly works with Excel should subscribe to. Most of the videos are 7-15 minutes long, and are very easy to follow (provided you have a basic grasp of Excel already).
If you’ve never checked out Girvin’s channel (and his energetic teaching style) before, the range of videos can be overwhelming. Luckily, he’s sorted these into descriptive playlists to help you find your way around. For example, you can find 68 videos to help you master the SUMPRODUCT function and 139 videos for mastering VLOOKUP.
5. Jon Peltier
Jon Peltier has been working with Excel since 1995 and is a whizz at using Virtual Basic for Applications (VBA) and Visual Basic. That’s why he has been acknowledged as a Most Valuable Professional (MVP) by Microsoft every year since 2001. The skills he teaches enable Excel to “be integrated with PowerPoint, Word, and other applications to supplement its analysis and reporting capabilities”.
Peltier’s extensive site, PeltierTech.com focuses on a wide range of Excel functions, but specializes in advanced tutorials “for achieving charting effects that, at first glance, seem impossible”. These include tutorials for Bar-Line charts, Pivot Charts, and Dynamic Charts.
6. Debra Dagleish
Author Debra Dagleish’s regularly updated blog on Contextures focuses on detailed, relatively advanced Excel tutorials. These zoom in on underused functions like using sheet selectors with no macros, as well as fixing common problems like VLOOKUP sorting issues.
On top of a large number of tutorials, you’ll also find a huge number of free Excel file downloads and video tutorials to really help you master these more advanced functions.
7. John Walkenbach
Having authored over 50 books (including the Excel Bible series) and hundreds of articles, Walkenback has surely earned the title “Excel Guru”. Not surprisingly, his website, SpreadsheetPage is one of the most popular sites about Excel out there.
Walkenbach’s blog covers plenty of Excel updates, and issues that you may want to explore further. More relevant to this article, however, is the lengthy list ofExcel tips available. These cover topics from playing MP3 files from Excel, tocreating a worksheet map. There’s even a page of downloads, with sections specifically for developers, and Excel add-ins.
8. Dinesh Kumar Takyar
35,000 people find Dinesh Kumar Takyar’s Excel YouTube channel worth subscribing to, with many of his videos receiving hundreds of thousands of views. The aim of the channel is to teach you to use both Excel and VB proficiently, with many of the topics coming from Takyar’s own students and viewers.
The direct style gets straight to the point, with easy-to-follow screen recordings introducing you to a whole array of new features. Some of Takyar’s more popular tutorials include transferring data from one worksheet to another, creatingnotifications in Excel, and designing a user form.
9. John Michaloudis
MyExcelOnline is an incredible resource for learning Excel run by John Michaloudis. Michaloudis has been working with Excel for the past 15 years, and now produces tutorials accompanied by easy-to-follow GIFs and downloadable workbooks. These short tutorials can help you solve “real life business cases” quickly and easily. They range from learning to connect slicers to multiple pivot tables, to jumping to cell references within a formula.
On top of these rapid-fire tutorials, John also hosts a popular Excel podcast, where other gurus from this list have made an appearance (among many others).
10. Brad Edgar
The Excel Blog is Brad Edgar’s way of sharing his Excel enthusiasm with the rest of the world. His mission is to help Excel users find “confidence and reason in their employment or business endeavors”. The articles on Edgar’s site go further than many of the others in this list. Instead of focusing solely on step-by-step tutorials, you’ll also be treated to other types of content, such as Excel tips that’ll make you look smarter than your co-workers.
Despite the blog not being updated too regularly, the range of content types makes this a fascinating blog to follow. And if you need to download any sample data to help you with other tutorials, you can purchase some on the site, too.
Where Else Do You Learn About Advanced Excel Functions?
The number of things you can do or problems you can solve with Excel is astounding. You can use basic formulas to solve real life problems, create dashboards to visualize complex data sets, and everything in between.
So no matter what you’re trying to achieve, the combined knowledge of these 10 Excel gurus will undoubtedly be enough to get you there. But there are still tons of fantastic resources we’ve not come across, let alone mentioned.
So, which Excel resources, and other Excel gurus, would you like to have seen on this list? Where do you go to solve your Excel problems, and to learn more about advanced Excel functions?
Source: http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/need-learn-excel-10-experts-will-teach-free/
Source: http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/need-learn-excel-10-experts-will-teach-free/
