Is Excel difficult to learn?

Learning Excel  

If you're a word person and aren't into numbers, you'll find Excel difficult to learn, and it might take some months of consistent practice for you to feel small, growing confidence in using the software. However, if you're a number person, learning Excel is a breeze. While Word persons will spend most of their time using MS Word or MS PowerPoint, crafting an amazing PowerPoint presentation for their department, Excel can help you manage a budget, track money, etc.

As stated earlier, Excel is very flexible, and it is easy to learn if you start slowly from the basics. Excel can help students with simple mathematical calculations as well as help accountants keep their clients' books in order. Imagine the same tool solving both the simple needs of an elementary student and the complexities found in an accounting office. If an elementary student decides to start learning Excel, starting with the accounting function, they will definitely find Excel easier to learn.

Is Excel difficult to learn or not?    

I would like to answer that question by asking this question, "Is riding a bicycle easy or difficult to learn?" Just like anybody can learn how to ride a bicycle, in like manner, anybody can learn Excel.

Just like you can't ride a bicycle like a pro or do stunts when you first start learning, you can only start with the  basics of Excel . Just like the more you practice riding your bicycle, the more confident you'll become in riding it, the more you practice Excel, the more you can grow in it. However, always put first things first. All Pros started as beginners, i.e., if you want to become an advanced Excel user, you have to grow into it from a baby step.

At first, learning Excel may look overwhelming, especially when you hear what you can do in using Excel, like VLOOKUP, What-if scenarios, and creating charts and graphs. The chances are that you may be gripped with fear. Nobody is born as an adult. Everybody grew through infancy, toddlerhood, pre-teen years, teenage years, young adults, and into adulthood. Similarly, you don't expect to become an accountant the first time you pick up Microsoft Excel – this will only make learning Excel look difficult. You have to grow into learning Excel by taking baby steps, and in no time, you will be walking through Excel and eventually running circles around your peers. Now that you know that Excel is easy to learn, you need to focus on being proficient rather than on obtaining a certificate when learning Excel.

When you're learning Excel, always take your time to learn what you're studying. That is, don't speed through the learning process. If you rush up learning Excel, you may learn less than you should. Hence, don't focus on learning Excel fast alone – in fact, fight the urge to learn fast – but also understand every concept taught. Suppose you focus on learning fast without a thorough understanding of every concept taught. In that case, you will definitely earn a certificate that shows you've completed an Excel course, but the certificate will be empty. Why? Because you won't know or be able to practice what the certificate says that you have learned. 

Therefore, always take your time to learn Excel. It's when you have taken your time to understand Excel concepts thoroughly and practiced the same lesson twice or thrice to ensure that you can handle it on your own that you'll be able to handle real-life situations when they come. More so, only when you really know and understand Excel concepts will you will be able to show and teach someone else. In conclusion, learning Excel is easy if and only if you start with the basics, take things slowly, and always practice the concepts you've learned.

Why do People see Excel as difficult to learn?

Before we continue, you may be tempted to ask this question, "Should I learn  Microsoft Excel or  Google Sheets ?" Well, we would recommend that you learn Excel. You may then proceed to learn Google Sheets once you're proficient in Excel. Excel is the standard and is, by all means, the authority when it comes to spreadsheet tools. More so, Excel has more learning resources available – online and offline – than any other spreadsheet program. Besides, Excel trainers or educators train students with Microsoft Excel.

Generally, all apps – and not Excel alone – seem hard to learn if you haven't used them before. You may certainly find it difficult to learn about Excel the first time you use it. So, where some people may claim that Excel is difficult, others will claim that it is simple. Excel has more than 450 functions, and most of them will look both useless and arcane if you're self-learning, especially when you come across the colons and dollar signs, filtering, sorting, pivot tables, charts, and formatting. There is way too much stuff to learn at the beginning, and learning Excel may need to be easier. 

Excel can handle a large variety of tasks. Most power users only ever touch a very small percentage of what it can do. A person can spend decades mastering some areas while never touching or even being aware of many other areas.  
Another thing is the need for more motivation to learn. Without motivation to learn Excel, you'll get pissed off and pull back each time Excel does things differently from what you expect or think how you expect it to be done. If this happens, you'll always find yourself fighting with Excel, trying to do something rather simple.

So rather than trying to remember the details of how everything is done, just remember that it is possible. When you need to do it, you will be properly motivated to learn how. And depending on how you learn, that process could be assisted by YouTube videos, books, websites, lectures, and colleagues. After you solve a few problems with Excel, you will start to understand how Excel thinks. Learning 

Excel will become easier as each new method starts knitting with what you've learned already. Another reason why Excel may seem hard to learn is that they are quite boring, especially to word people, and most people don't feel they need it or want it. If you work with data, Excel is extremely useful. For instance, learning to sum a column or sorting or filtering a table based on a column is relatively easy. However, you can end up wrestling with malformed data or having to inform Excel that a particular column is a date and should be in a particular format, or the entry may be a particular currency rather than just text.  

Sometimes, it is the calculation and not Excel itself that isn't very easy. Perhaps you are using the wrong tool to solve the problem. Perhaps Excel is not the best tool for your problem. Although Excel can handle quite large connected database tables, the tool was originally meant to be something other than a database thing. This can make the solutions sometimes look counter-intuitive and sometimes outright weird, slow, or rather cumbersome. The same thing applies when you use Excel for integrating differential equations, running large regressions, inverting matrices, etc.

To avoid running into issues with Excel, always define your problem first, analyze possible solutions, and choose the right tool. Excel is also difficult for the same reason that Photoshop or AutoCAD is difficult. All these are powerful multifunctional tools. They can be used to do very simple things, or they can be used to build amazingly complex solutions. Hence, trying to do complex things in Excel when you still need to get the idea makes the tool seem difficult to learn. However, MS has tried to improve Excel's functionality and make it easier to use. Concat is better than Concatenate. Suppose an error makes error handling formulae easier to read (and write) than If(Iserror).

The "XLookup" function seems better than "VLookup." The tables were great when they arrived, and they've got better. PowerQuery means we can replace lots of potentially error-prone steps with easily repeatable, powerful data management processes. If you want simpler Excel, fire up Excel online with Office365. You still need a bit of study just to understand where to start, but a lot of the complexity has gone. Unfortunately, that also means a lot of the capability has gone as well. But if all you want to do is add up some numbers, that might be fine.

Why Excel seems Difficult to Learn?    

• Most people using Excel do so intending to print the results. However, Excel has a grid-based format, which makes it a bit hard for users to place elements sequentially on a page since Excel is designed in such a way that it doesn't enable easy printing.
• Because it is a spreadsheet program, it is intended to be used for the tabulation of Data for analysis and consistency; however, it has a freeform method of creating "Tables" with no default location for headers.
• Multiple datasets can be placed on a "sheet," meaning that there isn't consistency for accessing.
• The formulas can be daunting, and one must know how the references work and think whether something should be entered or calculated.
• Being partway between database and word processor software, it has the functions to do both; however, by default, it does neither; this means that a fair amount of setup is needed for a document to be structured for different purposes.
• People are used to writing long paragraph format pros; however, the cells are arranged ideally for short individual phrases or single words/numbers. This makes formatting layouts and positioning elements tricky.
• Most people don't like them. For whatever reason, some people don't like the program, especially those who don't use it often. Some people will only go ahead and open an email with an Excel attachment and analyze the data in it for meaningful insights.
• Important data is hidden. Because you see all the raw data at once, it isn't easy to interpret what's important and what's not. As a result, it could sometimes be difficult for some workers to identify useful messages in an Excel file or see how the stored data can be related to their daily jobs.
• They are difficult to analyze. Again, especially for laypeople, spreadsheets take work to analyze. 
• Worse still, the volume of data presented may lead to misinterpretation, and your team could make poor choices or take wrong actions based on that misinterpretation. More so, people only familiar with spreadsheets and their associated tools tend to make charts and graphs that often distort data, including 3D graphs and pie charts, simply because the tool (like Excel) enables their easy creation.
• Loss of historical data. Microsoft Excel isn't created purposely to store historical data. For instance, in a bid to keep and manage the size of the program, Microsoft regularly releases updates that can cause firms to lose their historical data. Hence, it becomes difficult or almost impossible for firms to either compare data after a longer period or spot trends over time.
• It isn't easy to share. Even with cloud computing solutions, it isn't easy to share a spreadsheet among many team members. One of the main reasons for this is that there is a possibility that Excel data can be accidentally changed or deleted. Hence, the shared spreadsheet is rarely up-to-date in real time. Well, it may work well if the Excel file is emailed once a week, but this can also lead to the problem of misplacing the email in members' inboxes.

The Reasons Why Excel Is Not Difficult to learn   

• Excel is relatively easy to learn. It would be a myth to call it difficult software to learn. The interface is relatively simple and easy to understand. You can relate it to the tables we make on paper, and it is used for the same purpose – make tables on the computer. Thus, excel came into existence.
• Discrete data is efficiently stored in Excel. Discrete data is nothing but data such as a list of individual names, email addresses, values, a number of items, and other similar data.
• If you are using it for the first time, try making simple tables, such as timetables and schedules. Learn to do some basic formatting, such as making headers bold and bordering the tables. Later, once you get the gist of what Excel can do, you can move ahead to explore its other features and be proficient in Excel.
• Excel is a great skill you can learn to get employed as a professional. It is widely used in industries such as engineering, management, and accountancy.  
  Excel has a great number of potential features for the learners. You will be amazed once you start exploring the various things you can do in Excel.
• You can also make graphs and charts of your numerical data. It helps you make visualization and presentation efficiently and easily.
• As stated above, there are several resources available that can make you proficient in Excel. You can find an ample number of articles and videos that teach Excel. You can quickly master the basics of Excel without wasting much of your time searching and scrolling on the internet.
• You can also take dedicated Excel courses from BOTi, which take you from the very beginning and cover Excel concepts systematically. This will help you to save time and money.

Other reasons why Excel is not difficult to learn include the following:

• You don't need to learn specific codes to run the application. All the formulas in Excel are translated into your language; hence, "sum" will always be "sum," so you usually know what the formula is about right away.
• For everyday, non-commercial purposes, you can use Excel like a calculator. Add + here and * there, and your equation is ready. It even puts values from given cells when you click them.
• Most functions have a short manual (what are they for) that pops up when you hold your cursor over them, which makes it easy to use even if you see them for the first time.
• The same goes for functions and charts. If you need more clarification about which one should be used, you can go through a set of helpful windows that will ask you step-by-step what you want to achieve.
• Excel has one of the complete data organization and analysis systems for the common consumer. As such, Excel works for the majority of business apps, too. With the power of your computer, Excel can easily handle thousands of data formulas and computations rather seamlessly. If you have multiple sheets that are interlinked, the formulas and data organization are unrivaled.

Whether you're a total newbie to Excel or have begun a basic class in Excel, here are some functions you should know how to perform in Excel:

Carrying Out Basic Math Functions    

If Excel is installed on your PC, then you can stop reaching out for a calculator. You can use Excel to solve the most basic math functions! All you have to do is enter a few simple formulas. Here are the basic Excel formulas you need to know:    

Addition    

Enter "=SUM" in a blank cell where you want the total sum to appear, click on the SUM function that appears, hold down the Ctrl key, click on all the cells you want to add up, and then hit "Enter."    

Subtraction    

Enter "=" into the specific cell you want the answer to appear, click on the cell with the value you want to subtract from, enter "-," then click on the cell with the value you want to subtract. Click on enter.    

Multiplication    

Enter "=" into the specific cell you want the answer to appear, click on the cell with the value you want to multiply, type "*," and click the cell with the other value you want to multiply. Click on enter.    

Division

Enter "=" into the specific cell you want the answer to appear, click on the cell with the value you want to divide from, type "/," and click the cell with the other value you want to divide with. Click on enter.  Give the formulas above a try for yourself, and you'll quickly see that they aren't complicated at all.     

Note:  You can easily drag the same mathematical formula across a row or column. After entering the formula or function into one cell:    

• Click on the cell where the total appeared.    
• Click the little box that appears in the lower right-hand corner.    
• Drag it across the rest of the row or column where you need that formula to be applied.    

Conclusion    

Now you know the answer is yes, as long as you're ready to learn, start from the basics, and devote your time. Although Excel may seem complicated,  but it is very easy to learn.     

Related:        Is Excel a Relational Database?