Best way to use Excel skills?

[Jeo123]

Originally Posted by G-fused

Come on bro. it's not useless, just that if someone is going to invest time and effort, there are better areas to do that (you mentioned them so you know it too). Should he keep trying to enhance that VB knowledge or try to learn a bit of SQL or C#? Where would you invest your time? If he says to a programmer or Sr. BI person that he knows how to edit VBA scipts or that he knows Excel, they'll discount him. Does he wear a beeper too?

And sure, knowing a bit about command prompt can be useful but again...come on bro. Go back to 1995 - would you have invested your time in learning DOS or learning Windows?

Lastly, most people learn VBA the same way the OP is - by manipulating already written code. And even people who know it well, they hardly ever write code from scratch. That's crazy talk. What's important is knowing the function of that line of code, you know - speakin' the language.

I don't think we're disagreeing right? Are you telling the OP to go on and build on his Excel and VBA knowledge to lainch a successfull career from that? I bet you aren't. I bet you would advise him to not invest much time in either of those, in favor of more up to date tools.

It depends entirely upon what he's doing. In an accounting situation, most accountants won't have access to run SQL statements, so the knowledge is useless. I always advise people to learn a skill that applies to the problems they encounter in their current job and figure out a way to enhance those skill to apply to new problems. Without a doubt, someone who can put together SQL queries will be able to get to the data a lot easier. Most companies don't give people access to directly query their databases though.

I’ve been working in corporate treasury for five years and Iam planning to quit and find a new job basically within accounting or finance.

I work in accounting/finance, but I'm the Financial Systems Admin so there's an IT component to my job as well. The people around here love having someone who knows how to write macros, they couldn't care less about the fact that I can write entire programs though. The other day I put together something to turn a 3 day manual process into a 3 second process(literally 3.5, I have a timer on it). That's the stuff that makes you popular. Most accounting/finance jobs deal with a lot of repetitive work and they have tons of room for process improvement. You want to get well known for your excel skills? I'd suggest going there.

If he's trying to move to the Financial Systems side and take on more of a BI admin role, then sure, the other languages take on more importance, but that's not what he said he wanted to do, so I don't think that advice is relevant. Knowledge of SQL is meaningless unless you're in a role where they'll let you build your own queries. I know most large companies have IT policies in place that prevent direct queries to databases when there's an application layer in front. They expect you to go through the application layer making your SQL knowledge meaningless.

Ultimately though, it depends on what route the OP wants to take. A transition from a Treasury department to Accounting/Finance is an easy one to make, and in a role like that, I would definitely advise reading a book on VBA. It's cheap and easy to do.

And as for people never writing code from scratch? I write code on a pretty regular basis, these are new programs that don't exist and there's nothing for me to copy. Editing existing code is a great way to learn, but I stand by the fact that until you can write a macro without using that "record" feature, you don't know VBA.

Edit:

What's important is knowing the function of that line of code, you know - speakin' the language.

I disagree with that. A particular line of code isn't really that important. What's truly important is understanding the flow of the code. Not what that line does, but why it does it. Figuring out what an If statement does is easy. The question is, Why is that If statement necessary. Once you get programming, you can pick up new languages easily. They all follow roughly the same logic. It's understanding the flow of programming that really matters.

[Hemlock140]

Originally Posted by be.010

Thanks. Data analysis seems good to think about, except that it would probably take me back to entry level since my experience is mainly in finance.

A lot depends on the employer. For our finance and accounting people, SQL and Peoplesoft Financials
would be more important than having taught Excel, because they are used to extract the data for use in Excel.

[WoodstockSchool1980]

If you can accomplish something that gets the job done really well, it doesn't matter what code or application you're using.

I did one of my better accomplishments lately. An engineer was running an experiment and as she was starting it I set up an Excel spreadsheet that queried the database and charted the results in real time. There were three charts that compared three different kinds of data. She could refresh the data and charts at any time. I had access to the database and I knew how to sort it out.

She was expecting to analyze the data from her experiment afterwards, but when she saw what was going on, she changed her experiment as she was doing it. She told me that if she had analyzed the data afterwards, she would have done a second experiment, but because of what I made for her, she didn't have to. This saved her a lot of time.

It did a great job for this experiment. It doesn't matter to her that it wasn't some other application. In fact, I think she liked it that way because Excel is what she uses most, and she understood what was going on and could change it however she liked.