Viewing a single comment thread. View all comments

sadiesaysit t1_j984xb8 wrote

I never learned the skills but I’ve been wanting so bad to learn but confused on whether to learn Excel, googlesheets (isn’t that a thing?), or something else. What would I be using it for? I don’t know but let’s go with life and business information. What specific resources, YouTube or tutorials would you recommend?

8

Just-Take-One t1_j98p8b0 wrote

Excel Web is good enough for most users. You don't even need to learn any fancy commands, just simple mathematics is, again, good enough for most users. Google sheets will have all the same basic commands, just in a slightly different interface.

I've always found a personal budget to be a good learning tool. Write some expense labels on the rows, months in the columns, fill in a dollar amount in the middle and have a total column at the end. Formulas all follow the same general layout "=A1+B1+C1+D1". You can use mathematical functions too like "Sum" and "Average" etc which would look like "=SUM(A1:D1)".

Basically, just use it as a fancy calculator while you're learning.

14

sadiesaysit t1_j98sd75 wrote

Thanks for your advice! I’ll start with a simple budget and start playing around with it.

4

shastaxc t1_j9abnf1 wrote

I agree on the budget idea. I was just updating mine yesterday. I like to tag each expense with the account name that will pay it. I split my expenses to different accounts for different reasons, like shared expenses with my partner get paid from a joint account. I also think it's not fair to split joint expenses 50/50 because we make very different salaries so we split it according to the proportion of our post-tax income. So I have a formula that does all the math and then tells me how much money I need to deposit into the joint account each paycheck to cover those expenses, and same for my partner. I get paid twice a month whereas she gets paid every 2 weeks, so even if we split the bills 50/50 our deposit amounts per paycheck would be different.

It does a lot of other stuff too. This could all be done as quickly by hand the first time, but where spreadsheets really shine is reusing them later. Now, whenever I need to change an expense amount (prices for stuff change over time), add/remove expenses, or change income (which happens every year), all the info I need is recalculated instantly.

2

VDubDJ t1_j98h2gw wrote

W3schools is free and has a bunch of great intro stuff

5

Jill_X t1_j9a4ils wrote

Excel is probably the most wide-spread tool in offices.

My favourite is Google Spreadsheets / Docs, as it runs on almost any device with a browser and in an app on my Android phone. It also allows multiple users to view, comment on and edit the same document.

Then you have open office / libre office, which are open source clones of excel. They however use open document file formats, which are not supported by Excel.

Overall, they all work very similarly with slight differences in how to format formulas.

So, learning any of them gets you half-way to knowing the other.

2