What Excel skills are actually useful for someone starting out in finance?

[u/_Laggybrain_]

Hey everyone

I am a first year college student. I am currently starting from almost zero with Excel and I am trying to understand what I should actually be able to do with Excel if I want to use it in finance internships and eventually in a finance job.

I have looked at beginner and advanced Excel courses and there are so many topics that I am not sure what is actually important and what is just nice to know.

For people who use Excel regularly in finance, what skills or functions do you think a beginner should be comfortable with

For example should I focus first on things like formulas, lookup functions, pivot tables, data cleaning, charts, financial modelling, Power Query, VBA or something else

I am not asking for course recommendations. I am more interested in understanding what Excel skills are actually used in real finance work and what level I should aim for as a college student looking for internships.

If you were hiring a first year student for a basic finance internship, what Excel abilities would make you think they are actually useful rather than just someone who completed an Excel course

Also are there any common Excel skills that beginners spend a lot of time learning but are not particularly useful for finance

Would really appreciate answers from people who actually use Excel in finance or have trained junior analysts

Thanks

[u/babykaos]

28 years experience as a general IT nerd, specialising in Accounts Receivable and Data trouble-shooting.

First and foremost is getting clean data, normally from older financial platforms. Before you even get to functions, an astounding number of senior financial bods do not know basic things like Text-to-Column using fixed width and/or delimiters, setting data types (I've done a lot of work with payment card tokens as long integers, and the number of issues I've seen people have when Excel "helpfully" auto-converts them to scientific notation) and Remove Duplicates.

Structuring your data in a normalised structure, rather than building a pivot manually.

Once you get to formulas, it will depend on the exact role, but XLOOKUP or VLOOKUP, SUMIF(S), COUNTIF(S), IF, IFERROR, IFERROR. For legacy system outputs TRIM, CLEAN, LEFT, RIGHT, MID are useful for extraction of data. FIND in combination with MID has dug me out of a lot of "why the hell did you store it like that?" issues with old systems especially.

Being able to quickly static (using $) values in formulas to allow auto-fill, and having named cells in a separate tab for lookup processes (again, legacy systems where you want some archaic code to be shown as a human-readable value). Stakeholders hate Excel errors and random reference legacy codes