Crucial Excel skills for consultants

If there ever was a software guilty of feature-overload, Microsoft Excel would probably be at the top of that list. It is an industry standard for casual consumers, amateurs, professionals, and even businesses. Seldom does a software reach this pinnacle of having the flexibility, ease, and yet the power to serve & dominate all segments of users. I am sure Microsoft does not know the full extent of ways in which Perhaps the only other software to have ever even been in the vicinity of that pinnacle, are Adobe Photoshop and Microsoft PowerPoint.

Section 1: Uses of Excel in consulting

In consulting, these are some of the most-common uses for Excel:

Data Setup: Cleaning-up and setting-up client’s financial and operational data for further analysis
Data Analysis: Analyzing the client’s financial and operational data to draw insights and prove hypotheses that will help in moving the case forward
Showing Insights: Create charts from the outputs generated during data analysis to help the client in easily visualizing insights. These charts will be typically be embedded in slides.
Financial & Business Planning: Creating financial models for the client’s existing and/or new businesses that will allow the client to take investment decisions
Build & Transfer: Providing all your analysis and models to the client upon project conclusion
Project Management: Creating planners and gantt charts for managing a client project or helping the client in managing one of their own projects
Personal Management: Creating your personal activity tracker
And many others…

Section 2: Six Key Excel skills

Key skills required across these use cases are as follows. The list below is only an introduction to the most essential skills in excel. There is no end to Excel mastery. As you work with it and learn it on your own – always ask yourself if you can do things more efficiently. Chance are you can – and chances are that excel has a feature for that already.