Simply Rimmy

Whatever success I had in my career, a large part of it I owe to Microsoft Excel. I can say, I am a Pro user of excel, and being good at it has given me many career advantages and especially courage to try out new things. Through out my career I have automated so many things that I have lost count of it now, so much so that I have converted a full month of work to a job of 3 days.

I used to be a very basic user of excel during start of my career, and the first wonder that I came to know of it was that of conditional formatting. Try it, you would love it too!! This really made me interested in the application, as I wondered what all could be done with it. And then came an opportunity where I was asked to teach Advanced Excel to a group of new hires in the company (I was already a trainer for Primavera P6). Thats when I learned Excel in order to teach it, but it was a very good experience and it opened up a window of all the things that could be done with excel. I tried my hands on VBA as well for teaching it out, never thought I would be using it so much.

It was after I shifted to Canada, that I was able to see first application of VBA. I just knew that the task at hand can be automated via VBA and I asked my manager if I should take a stab at it, like why not right? And it worked!! I was able to automate an 8 hour manual job to 10 mins job. 97.9% time savings!! This was amazing for both me and my manager and after that I automated numerous jobs in my department and other departments as well. And this boosted both my position and compensation in the company. After that there was no looking back, I have automated numerous processes in all the jobs that I have worked in and everywhere it resulted in atleast 90% time savings if not more. In my last job I automated the whole job, such that the full month work can now be done in 3 days only.

I cannot say that I do know everything, but I ususally have an idea if a problem could be solved via VBA or Python or some other application. And there is always Google, The God. You can ask for anything and it will be provided. Just make sure you ask the right question. I think this is the best way to learn anything. Have a project or problem at hand, Break it into smaller problems and search for specific part of that problem. Like for my first task, I had to combine several csv files in one excel sheet and perform analysis on it. But at that time I did not know how to do that via VBA, So I asked Google and I was given the answer. I still dont remember the code, but I know it can be done and will be able to recreate it if required.

Being good at Excel can help you a lot too. And you dont need to remember everything, just know of the things that can be done with it. I have thought of creating a series of blogs to go through important features of excel. I will post it every Monday. Hope this helps. Thanks for reading and happy learning!!