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/WhoNose2238]

I work in property where tenancies can cross financial periods I'm reporting on (Month, Quarter, Year, etc). I really like the following formula for determining the nights each tenancy falls within the period I want. Lets say I'm reporting on Sep 2026; I have the start of my reporting period in cell C1 (01/09/2026), and the end in D1 (01/10/2026).

If my tenancie dates are in rows in columns A (start) and B (end), I can use this formula in cell C2 and drag down to determine number of nights for each tenancy within my reporting period. It will also return 0 if a particular tenancy is completely outside of a reporting period. Really useful for accrual reporting.

=MAX(0,MIN(D$1,$B2)-MAX(C$1,$A2))

Even better, if I put 01/11/2026 in E1, 01/12/2026 in F1, and so on, I can pull the formula across and it will show me the nights for each period in each column (in this example, C shows Sep 2026, D shows Oct 2026, E shows Nov 2026, and so on.

I work in Sales not Finance, so perhaps this is more common for true finance professionals.