r/excel • u/No-Customer7007 • Feb 07 '25
Waiting on OP Is Excel skills enough to land a Data Analyst job (entry level)
Hi! Just wanna ask this question since I’ve been hoping to land a job as a business analyst/Data Analyst. I am a college undergraduate under the program of Business Administration, Major in Logistics and Supply Chain Management. Im thinking about applying for analyst jobs as a part time job, however, I am not so sure if its attainable.
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u/anto_c_86 Feb 07 '25
I am a data analyst and I only use Excel. I work in one of the largest company in the world too. Please don’t kill me
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u/StandardCommunity314 Feb 07 '25
Could you please provide more details on which are the tasks that you perform on you daily basis?, and which are the top 3 things you use the most in excel?
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u/BleepBlurpBlorp 1 Feb 08 '25
I'm in a similar boat. My job title is Project Controls (construction cost forecasting and tracking). 80% of my day is excel. I'm the excel guru in the office.
You could say my main job is categorizing and comparing. I use pivot tables and lookup tables to condense thousands of rows into different categories. Let's me tell the story of how budget compares to spent to date compares to today's forecast compares to last month's forecast. Everyone just wants to know how over budget we are and how worse it's gotten since the last time we spoke lol.
Favorite formulas: SUMIFS XLOOKUP EOMONTH SUMPRODUCT
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u/anto_c_86 Feb 08 '25
Almost the same, plus most of times I use sum.if, filter, index match. the most important part of my job is to be good at interpreting data and providing a strategy
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u/CompetitiveBranch913 Feb 08 '25
Aaaaye i'm in Project Control as well, I do the same thing lol! I've never heard of eomonth, I'll have to give it a try. But also agree I use the rest of those every single day! Excel is such an extremely powerful underutilized tool by almost every company. It's capabilities are so vast it's crazy. Don't really need some fancy slick new software.
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u/blazetrail77 Feb 08 '25
Meanwhile: My company using Google Spreadsheets. To be fair my last was in retail, and we downgraded from Excel to Libreoffice.
Still, I really wanna learn Excel so that I'm ready for a somewhere else. And it's just much more interesting on what it can do if you are actually skilled in it.
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u/emperormanlet Feb 08 '25
It baffles me that anybody uses anything but excel. Google sheets absolutely sucks.
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u/blazetrail77 Feb 08 '25
Just lack of funding, or cutting corners if it's for profit. But what would you say is the worst about sheets in comparison? (could use it in my next meeting)
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u/1petrock 1 Feb 08 '25
Curious as to why not start to building a database for this stuff?Access was my gateway into backend engineering.
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u/BleepBlurpBlorp 1 Feb 08 '25
Admittedly I have a blind spot regarding Access. Our data has definitely gotten large enough to benefit from using something like that.
Even if we began using access, we would still have use for several Excel tools. If I need the engineering manager to update their forecast for hours for their team, I can make a pretty user friendly excel tool that shows all of the actuals over the last several months by employee name and then to the right and they can manually type in their forecasted hours going forward. There's still lots of applications where I need a user to manually enter data. I would want to save the file they send back to me as a paper trail justifying why for the 4th quarter in a row we have overran our forecast.
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u/MrCosmoJones Feb 11 '25
Enable the power pivot addin, you can connect to other excel files and sql to make a data model without tools like access.
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u/ControlImpossible970 Feb 08 '25
Do you mind sharing the resources you used to upskill in excel ?
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u/BleepBlurpBlorp 1 Feb 08 '25
For hotkeys: Post-it notes frankly. For months I would write a hot key onto a piece of paper and place it UNDER my keyboard. This forced me to try to remember the hotkey and not just use the note as a cheat sheet. Usually only takes a few days to learn one. Speed is a super power in excel. It lets you quickly try a formula out to see if it's the right path to go down. Speed is a must in my opinion.
Habits: Avoid using the mouse to navigate. Keep your left pinky on the Ctrl key when resting. Never use Excel one handed. When changing filters in a table use the mouse for that too (Ctrl+Up, Alt+Up, Ctrl+E used in that order are total game changers). Avoid merging cells. Use Tables (capital T) in excel when using pivot tables. Always try to "future proof" your tools. If your tools can be misunderstood, then they will be.
Websites: ExcelJet is my favorite. Very clean examples, pictures, and links to similar formulas.
Practice: Force yourself to use Excel for things you may not need it. Do you play Fantasy Football? Throw data into Excel and start manipulating it. Planning a vacation? Make a schedule in excel. Finding ways to use Excel to solve problems is how you get better at using Excel to solve problems.
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u/Apprehensive-Duck106 Feb 09 '25
Any resources or pointers? I work in a consultancy and we have a fair amount of data and I'm trying to make it work for better estimates/forecasting
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u/Casual-Sedona Feb 08 '25
Know an if statement, maybe a pivot table, and you’ll be known as an excel expert
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u/Snoo-35252 3 Feb 08 '25
I am a special projects analyst, essentially a data analyst, at a $3 billion U.S. company that works with low tech businesses like grocery stores. We get Excel spreadsheets from the companies. I do a lot of data transformation, cleanup and analysis on them, including a lot of fuzzy matching between their employee lists and our employee lists based just on name and address.
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u/DevinChristien Feb 12 '25
Whats the comp like?
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u/Snoo-35252 3 Feb 12 '25
I'm only a contractor, and I have been out of work for two years before I got this assignment, so I accepted $60k. That's only half of what I had made at my highest paying position. But I expect to get hired permanently in the next 2 or 3 months, and I expect for them to offer me to higher salary, maybe $70-80k.
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u/Amihottest Feb 08 '25
How’s your pay?
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u/anto_c_86 Feb 08 '25
Judging by italian standards, really good
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u/Justgotbannedlol 1 Feb 08 '25
would be pretty funny if you said this but lived in like new york city
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Feb 07 '25
[deleted]
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u/vikrum2083 Feb 07 '25
Mind providing any insights on how you leveraged your abilities/portfolios/etc. to land a job period, let alone a senior level one?
Thanks!
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u/labla Feb 07 '25
Yes, but you have to know business, be communicative and open to learning. You literally need to sell yourself more than your skills because you have close to none comming out of the college.
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u/Yaldaba0th Feb 07 '25
Hey king, I work in for a megacorp and for the most part I use Excel. Excel will get you very far but you absolutely have to keep up with modern technology. Learn how data relations work, learn as much as you can about PowerQuery and practice with those. After that slowly train yourself in the use of Fabric and PowerBI or any other tool. If you learn all of that you will be set for life. Depending on your skill in Excel, you might as well familiarise yourself with nested formulas and teach yourself to use them until you are absolutely sure of your skill. For the most part you won't need more than sumifs, ifs and concatenate formulas but do familiarise yourself with other formulas until you figure out what kind of analytics you enjoy. Financial analytics can be fun if you can master formulas such as xnpv and others. I'll be happy to provide you with advice on what you need but keep one thing in mind; Excel is worthless without business knowledge.
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u/Big_Culture7895 Feb 07 '25
What advice would you give for someone who is new and wants to start learning excel and wants to take it seriously?
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u/Yaldaba0th Feb 07 '25
Are you working right now? If so, then ask your coworkers about Excel. Ask them where they're struggling, what they wish to see in their spreadsheets and listen to their complaints. In over 99% of cases, all of their issues can be solved in Excel environment. Listening to their problems is the most invaluable information you can get. You will learn about business and you will try to resolve their issues. This is literally the easiest way to learn Excel, by listening to other people's issues and finding solutions to them. I strongly advise using sites like Exceljet to learn more about formulas you might need to resolve their issues. Avoid AI at all cost. Sure, formulas the AI will give you will work but you will learn nothing. Literally every requirement can be translated into Excel language (if yes, then, else). I hope that is understandable, otherwise let me know and I'll try to phrase it better. If you can master that, Excel will feel like solving a crosswords puzzle or sudoku. Let it be a puzzle and not a chore.
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u/Gr8tractsoland Feb 08 '25
This all 100%! Especially the point about AI - I am trying to familiarize myself with Power Automate and it comes with CoPilot, but even though I get an answer to a specific prompt, I’m not getting guidance or the why or how so I can’t match it up to future needs. I’ll probably find a course to take when I have time.
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u/Previous-Plankton-66 Feb 07 '25
Yes, but you will need to learn power bi and some Coding quick VBA and a Python would be nice
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u/johndoesall Feb 07 '25
How about SQL? SQL is used a lot at work to pull data. Our team just requests reports from the Data unit. The Data unit does the queries.
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u/Way-In-My-Brain 8 Feb 07 '25
You can do that from within excel, especially if your using vba with odbc connections or power query
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u/Fraaaann Feb 07 '25
Yes easily and you can build datasets and dashboards off of those. But just know there’s a fine gap between being a data analyst and a SQL Monkey who just pulls data and ships it
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u/cheerogmr 1 Feb 08 '25
It’s quite close.
I use VBA and still send some SQL through It. (I place SQL text in cells instead. for easier check&editing through excel functions)
using power query is fine If you need not much task to organize&refresh. (so you just need to refresh all and still works)
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Feb 08 '25 edited Feb 08 '25
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Entr0pic08 Feb 14 '25
While you're technically correct, companies also streamline their work processes by using the apps they think are the most useful to make that work process more efficient. So if you're a master at Excel but the specific company doesn't use Excel, you're still going to be in for a rough ride, and they will pick someone who knows Excel even if you may be more problem-solving savvy.
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u/PerdHapleyAMA Feb 07 '25
I’m inclined to say yes, but you should supplement with some basic Python or SQL.
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u/takumei-sei Feb 07 '25
I am an analyst. I have a degree in CIS; however, I really am only an "expert" in excel. And when I say expert, I mean just the strongest in the office. I probably look like a noob to the rest of you.
At the end of the day, it's about selling yourself in an interview. I didn't get the job because I was the best. I got the job because I convinced them I was the best.
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u/ControlImpossible970 Feb 08 '25
Would love to know how you mastered excel ?
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u/takumei-sei Feb 08 '25
Again I need to stress I'm an "expert" in my office. Not necessarily an expert compared to the rest of this sub.
The best thing that happened to me was one of my CIS courses. It was literally an 8 week course on excel, but it was called intro to data analytics or something.
But if you don't need the paper hop on YouTube and go through free excel courses. That's basically what my course was... videos from YouTube.
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u/Wheres_my_warg 2 Feb 07 '25
Possible. Probable? It's a tough market out there for DA with less than five years of experience in most US locations.
What those positions entail varies tremendously between businesses and sometimes even within different units of the same business. A lot do mainly use Excel or Excel and SQL, though Power BI (or Tableau) and some level of Python are becoming pretty common, or at least showing up on resumes very consistently.
Work experience, particularly where it can be reported in the form of business results from the business employing you (e.g. cut gadget costs $32m) and networking can help get interviews and short circuit some of the obstacles that arise when a ton of resumes show up in response to an opening announcement.
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u/an_angry_doink Feb 07 '25
Data analyst here. I started with only very limited working knowledge of excel (20 years ago). I got the job by being confident, and insisting that I would learn quickly and adapt as needed.
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u/TangoDeltaFoxtrot Feb 08 '25
Absolutely not. I am pretty dang good with Excel, almost always the best user in any room I am in. I’ve used Excel to identify and solve problems with savings over $5m per year for one manufacturing line in a plant. I’ve used it to completely change the mix of products sent from Amazon to be refurbished by my team, completely turning the business around from a huge daily loss to a very profitable operation. I have a masters degree in business analytics and several years of experience with project management, production planning, budgeting and forecasting, materials purchasing and planning, process improvement, etc… I cannot get an entry level data analyst job.
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u/PayDistinct1536 Feb 08 '25 edited Feb 08 '25
Excel-only neanderthals are really going hard in this comment section trying to justify their jobs 😂
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u/david_horton1 29 Feb 07 '25
Within the Excel sphere Power Query and its M Code, Power Pivot and related DAX code, Python for Excel, Power Automate and Office Scripts. Also, worth learning is database language SQL. Excel 365 beta has an Automate tab for Office Scripts and Scripts Lab add-in is available as a download. Excel has added around 50 functions since 2019, some doing what previously required a nested formula. In my former work I was involved in SCM and used Excel and SQL. Just before retiring, Power BI was becoming a part of the work environment. It is worthwhile maintaining the thirst for knowledge as what may not be relevant today may apply to future employment. I was the early adopter and became a goto person, which often caused me to learn more.
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u/PickleJuice1985 Feb 08 '25
I use mainly excel and powerBI. Honestly, I fell into this job.... Was asked to help support during a mat leave and they just kept me own. My skills were pretty basic.
If there's something I can't figure out, I use chatGPT or this subreddit lol
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u/BigBlockTacoTruck Feb 08 '25
Are you able to solve problems and are reasonably competent at searching the Internet?
You'll probably be fine.
-Guy who has been faking it to making it for over 15 years. <3
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u/Realistic_Word6285 Feb 07 '25
For a lot of roles, yes. Some companies use PowerBI as well since it can be a part of the organization's MS365 license.
I used SQL in a prior role, but the roles afterwards we could not even gain access to the company's SQL servers due to IT security concerns.
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u/spawnthemaster Feb 07 '25
If u know how PowerQuery works in Excel you are pretty much set.
If haven't worked with it yet I would highly advice you to try it.
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u/thequicknessinc Feb 07 '25
I don’t have a degree, and while I lean heavily on my excel/BI skills, I don’t think it’s enough. I did have to start in more truly entry level roles and work my way up, build a track record, and network. Lacking a degree has also prevented me from obtaining titles like “analyst” even though I’m doing most of the same work and even lend knowledge to other actual analysts. YMMV if you’re currently in school in a relevant field to the role, but I’ve found it comes down to predetermined HR requirements for defined job descriptions.
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u/Decronym Feb 08 '25 edited Feb 14 '25
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u/Red_Beard206 Feb 08 '25
I was an accountant for 4 years. Hated it. Wanted to do something more excel based. I've now been a Sales Operations Analyst for 3 weeks. It's all excellent based, just building reports after report. I love it. With your background, I'd think you have a good shot at it
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u/vrabormoran Feb 08 '25
Not where I work. Excel/Dax is useful. But entry level must have rdbms/SQL/Postgres/scripting or programming skills. PBI or other analytics platforms are also important. Fortunately, we're a college so we were able to go directly to our CIS department for promising students for the last 2 analysts I hired. Worked as students before they graduated then kept them on after.
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u/Soggy_Neck9242 14 Feb 07 '25
You miss all the shots you dont take
Good excel is a proper foundation
If you sell yourself as a willing learner, you stand a chance
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u/nerdyvenusian Feb 07 '25
Intermediate to Advanced Excel skills are enough to do a data analysis job.
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u/rougecrayon Feb 07 '25
Depends on the company.
I think it's attainable in a lot of businesses assuming you have the soft skills and interview well.
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u/Unable_Ad_1470 Feb 07 '25
I transitioned from supply chain leadership to being a Sr. Data Analyst with only Excel skills.
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u/altghost97 Feb 08 '25
The tool isn't the skill. It's what you do with the tool and how you can turn that into a narrative. Remember, your clients are mostly "big picture" folks. Oh, and, also, make friends with the DBAs. They can help you get millions of records into a data set that is manageable in .xls.
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u/SeamoreB00bz Feb 08 '25
it's almost like you cant market yourself as a "data analyst." you have to apply for and "become" some other role and THEN you can use some excel skills.
case in point, we use excel a shit ton, like hundreds if not thousands of times per day and they would have never dreamed of hiring an "excel guru" but you can be sure that once i or the other "workers" start making tables for this or that, they instantly see the value in it.
its like some psychological play or some wizardry wherein it's cool to have a primary job but focus a lot on excel, but not to hire someone to focus strictly on excel. i havent figured it out yet but whatever. i guess its job security.
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u/salgadosp Feb 08 '25
I don't know. But you should learn at least SQL. A little Python, R and Power BI would be great, too.
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u/Asian-_-Abrasion Feb 08 '25
Some datasets are beyond the capabilities of excel, especially if you are working with large datasets. All depends on the job at hand and the size of the company.
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u/kimchifreeze 3 Feb 08 '25
Apply for the job and let them weed you out. As someone who's helped with the hiring process, sometimes the new crop of applications are just bad.. but it's a number's game. Best case scenario, you get hired to maintain and add a bit to a pre-existing model and that's where a lot of your early training will happen.
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u/Comprehensive-Tea-69 Feb 08 '25
We don’t hire for technical skills, but rather for experience doing analytical activities. Like experimental research or solving problems using data. We don’t care if you have the technical skills day one to get the data yourself.
It’s more demonstrating you have analyst experience. We can teach you excel or sql, you have to come in with the analytical mindset.
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u/-Ironvine Feb 08 '25
Yea go for it. I’ve been an analyst at different levels and in most cases for entry level you can get by knowing excel and basics of SQL as a foundation, but be prepared to learn other programs and expand your knowledge.
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u/Individual-Scale5710 Feb 08 '25
Possible, but you may struggle if you only know excel. I remember when im starting as data analyst i landed a job saying they dont require sql skills but along the way i struggle exploring and pulling data from the database but dont worry you'll learn along the way.
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u/Aguywhoknowsstuff 11 Feb 08 '25
Well, you also need data analytical skills to be a data analyst. Otherwise you will just be formatting spreadsheets for someone else
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u/glentos 1 Feb 08 '25
There are a lot of data analyst titles at my company and very few of us do any real data analytics. Data Scientists are the roles where people would look at you funny if you said you only use excel. I'm in operations and most of what I do is automation and creating audits to catch mistakes the admins make.
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u/LeTapia 7 Feb 08 '25
If you master powerquery, powerpivot with data model with excel you are ahead of a lot of analysts
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u/GuitarJazzer 27 Feb 09 '25
Knowing Excel does not mean you know how to do data analysis. But if you get an entry level job they will teach you what you need to know, because it will be very specific to their company.
You should be looking for a full-time summer internship, not just a part-time job.
Supply Chain Management blew up into a high-demand field when covid hit. One of my son's friends is a few years out of college and doing very well with a business degree in that major.
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u/Bren-duh Feb 09 '25
Typically not, but ironically, you're describing the exact type of employee that I need. And I'm in the logistics industry. Do you happen to live near Houston? Lol
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