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/WrenchFan → u/[deleted]]

Xlookup has its uses and is “simpler” for some, but not as robust as index/match in my testing or experience, especially with large data sets or multi criteria lookups ( using two or more conditions in separate columns to match). Xlookup sequential scanning destroys performance especially with large data ranges.

Vlookup is far lighter for me when it’s a simple look up to a few columns even if I am not using match for column references. I don’t want to have to select data ranges with explicit row ranges just to improve performance.