Hello Friends and welcome to our 21st Member Mondays. As we reached a milestone of having 20,000 members. We have featured a few really amazing members who help our group to be the best Excel group there is. For this week we will highlight another member who without a doubt had been a great help ever since, and that is Antriksh Sharma. Thank you so much Antriksh for all the efforts you have given, and for the insights you shared. All that you did for the group is very much appreciated. You are one of the members we are lucky to have. Congratulations!
Let us take a look at his answers about his Excel Journey:
1. How did your start your Excel journey?
I knew about excel since my High School days(2012) but could never wrap my head around its usage apart from creating list of students and printing it, for next few years in college I used it for basic mathematics and never knew about the formulas, fast forward to March 2016 I had an interview and the Job description stated “Candidate should know lookup, countifs, sumifs, nested IFs, and basic understanding of Goal Seek”, and I mugged up everything I could and somehow cleared the interview and after that I realized the importance of learning this tool and then there was no stopping, for next 1 year I got into nitty gritty of excel and was even able to get a hang of Array formulas, then in Q4 2017 I started learning VBA and then I was introduced to Power BI/Query/Pivot
2. Why did you chose Excel?
It is everything you need, it is cheap, reliable & flexible, MS actually listens to its community, I use it to extract data from web, run analysis on 50-90 million rows of data, create beautiful visuals, track my expenses, create small apps, automate other office tools. Tell me if any other tool that can do this so efficiently.
3. How long have you been working with Excel?
Since 2016
4. How has Excel for Freelancers helped you?
EFF has provided me a platform to support and help people all over the world, I even got to make two good friends from Romania and U.S.A, the community is rich and constantly growing even though I possess a great deal of Excel Knowledge but I think I am still a noob compared to other wizards in the group.
Secondly, I appreciate the thoughts and efforts Randy Austin puts in growing this group and in his videos. Whenever I see his videos, I am astonished by how he was able to think of something like that! As the saying goes If you can imagine it, you can achieve it. If you can dream it, you can become it.
5. What are your goals?
My goal is to continue to support the community and keep on learning everything that Excel has to offer, Until mid-2017 I didn’t even know about VBA and until mid-2018 I had no Idea about Power BI, Power Query, Power Pivot but on this date I know so much about these tools that I can actually help a beginner come up to an intermediate level
6. What advice can you give to our members?
Don’t reach out to a community just to get done with your current problem, every day, I see people are only interested in getting their problem at hand resolved but are not ready to actually learn how it was resolved. With that kind of approach you won’t be able to go too far in terms of learning Excel, just because someone provided you a solution doesn’t mean you have to accept it, it could be really inefficient or efficient, ask the person meaningful question how they did it? what made them think of using certain libraries, take a 5 WHY approach with the one who resolved and then ask those 5 Why form yourself(why didn’t I think of it, Why I don’t know about it etc.) when I was learning VBA for almost 1 week I wasn’t able to understand what is the use of a Parameter, what are Methods and Properties but I didn’t quit I kept pushing myself to understand basics which ultimately helped in understanding VBA to a great extent, my advice for those who jump directly on the band wagon and let’s say start their VBA journey with User Forms but don’t even know how to properly declare variables, just don’t do that! You will spend years but will not get where you want to be. Start from basics and then gradually move up
Before asking a question make sure you check out the below websites because there is a 99.99% chance that it has been already taken up by someone else
1. Google
2. Stack Overflow
3. Mr. Excel
4. YouTube
Now, congratulations if you have read all my rant, here is a gift for you. If you want to really learn Excel in and out, then follow some of these wizards:
- Youtube
- ExcelIsFun (Mike Girvin) – For almost everything you can think of except Dashboards, in my opinion that is not his forte, he is living legend for me
- WiseOwlTutorials (Andrew Gould) – There is no such teacher like him for VBA/Power BI and what not, all I ever know of VBA is because of him
- Excel for freelancer (Randy Austin) – To see excel doing things that nobody could think of
- Leila Gharani – Dashboards and Excel formulas
- ExcelVBAisFun (Daniel Strong) – VBA, he is fan of ExcelIsFun
- Udemy
- Gilly Dow – DAX, Power Pivot
- Chris Dutton – Power BI
- Daniel Strong – VBA Web Automation, Bar code
- Books
- The Definitive Guide to DAX
Finally, something I want to get off my chest since a long time, is it just me or do you also feel that Randy Austin has some resemblance to Stone Cold Steve Austin and coincidentally their last names are similar too
