Discover the Best Consultant Bill Format in Excel for Management

Consultant bill format in excel for Management

what are the essential excel skills for management consultants hi everyone my name is johannes and welcome to his channel welcome to mastering consulting on this channel i share my own learnings and experiences from my own current journey in management consulting to help you to become successful in consulting and also live a balanced life and if you're new to this channel then please make sure to subscribe to it also please leave a thumb up this will help you that you don't miss any new video here coming out and today we have a very essential topic that many people ask me about we will talk about the essential excel skills as a management consultant and why is excel so important and why is this video so important so basically especially at the beginning of your career you need to make sure that you know how to do two things okay first of all you need to know how to work in powerpoint and how to work on presentations and second you need to know how to work in excel the reason for that is that especially at the beginning your task will mainly be to support your team by preparing powerpoint slides or preparing excel files okay this is very very crucial of course you will have many other tasks in consulting at the beginning as well but like half of the time you will work with those two tools so it's very important that you know what kind of skills you need that you know what kinds of functions you should be aware of and this is what we will cover today in this video today i will give you an overview and nevertheless there is one important recommendation um you have to know of course the theory but you only learn excel if you practice it okay so try to get as much practice as possible wherever you have the opportunity and possibility to work on excel models maybe in university maybe in a student club maybe in an internship always try to you know be the one who does the excel work because this gives you some additional time where you can practice okay so keep in mind theories you want one thing but you only learn excel if you practice practice practice with that being said i want to talk about three main essential skills and areas and let's talk about the very first one at the beginning and the first skill that you need to know and that you need to be aware of is that you learn how to prepare data okay so usually if you ask for data from your client if you ask for data maybe from a database or if you get the data from a database you very often get it in a very unstructured way okay so the first task and the first skill set that you should know and that you should be aware of is the skill set of preparing data and what does that mean um speaking more concrete and concretely so first of all i would say the text to columns function is very important and this helps you to you know if you get an unstructured edge structured data set you bring it in a structured way in columns also you should know how to use text manipulation formulas because very often the data or the text strings are not in a way that you want them to have you should also know how to learn how to set up and data tables this will help you to get them in a nice format and analyze them yeah you also have filtering sorting functions so this should be also something that you should be aware of and of course the big topic of pivot tables so this is also essential you know this helps you to slice and dice various data sets and this is definitely a course built in consulting and also you should know things like how to use data validation for example and this is you know just a a list of potential things that you should know probably the most important ones in my opinion there are other people who say probably that other things are also important but based on my experience those are the most important functions and skills that you should be aware of if we talk about preparing data then of course after you prepare the data it's time for the next step it's time for the next skill set and this skill set is how to analyze data and this is typically like the main work in consulting because this is typically where you build your models this is you know where you really try to get um to the result of your analysis there are several functions or function groups so to say that you should be aware of first of all there are the querying functions okay so this is functions like sum if for example you should be aware of those then there are the logical functions like if functions okay there are several other functions like if errors and ifs and you know other variations of the if function so this is summarized as as a logical functions you should also be aware of the lookup function i know you shouldn't use them and this is a topic for another video but you should at least know how to use them because many people from controlling departments accounting departments and so on use those functions so be aware of the lookup functions then one thing you should take a look at and we will definitely make another video about that is the index match and also the index match indirect function okay so those are several basically those are three functions that you can combine together and if you do that you have a very very powerful querying tool in your excel um file and of course you know sometimes also array functions help i think you know the most important one is the transpose function because this helps you to prepare data for um charts for example if you want to visualize something and this is the second skill set okay um analyzing data and those are probably the functions that are the most important ones so be aware of them okay know them and know how to use them know how they work also know when it makes sense to use them so this is very very important and then the third skill set i want to talk about is the last one and this is to visualize the data okay because after preparing it after doing the analysis it's always time to visualize the data there are several things that you should know so first of all you should definitely know how to work with basic charts so there is a chart um function in or for um a section in excel so be aware um on how to use that there are also some basic formatting rules for example like um you know removing grid lines um you know how to um highlight input cells for examples and so this is just basic stuff that you should also be aware of then you should know how to work with custom formats so if you talk about number formatting then you should be aware of you know how to format numbers and also how to apply custom formatting because this will help you if you want to display a number in a certain way and of course you know conditional formatting and so on and so on so those are also very important functions in excel and this is what i would consider to be the most important functions if we talk about data visualization now many people ask probably okay you know what about um other stuff like goal seeker you know like a visual basics for example do i need to know that if i want to go into consulting and i would definitely say that with those three skill sets that i just introduced to you if you know all of that stuff you will be prepared for like 80 to 90 of the excel work that you do as a management consultant okay of course you know um there are always the projects and the tasks but you have to do some more special topics some more sophisticated excel work but believe me do the other stuff first be really strong on them and then if you have time or if there is an opportunity to learn md special topics you can focus on them okay so what are special topics for example those are sensitivity tables this uh helps you sometimes if you work in a business case and want to check out the sensitivity of certain assumptions then you also can use goal seeker function and if you are looking um for a certain value in a formula then the solver also helps and of course you can use powerpivots and power queries if you work with large amount of data and of course visual basics if you want to program your own um little functions but again i would say that you know if you focus on the most important stuff in data preparation if you focus on the most important stuff and data analysis and then also the most important stuff that i talked about in data visualization this will be certainly a very very good foundation for your work as a management consultant and this is certainly you know will prepare you for 80 to 90 of your work so with that being said if you want to know more about excel skills in management consultant consulting then please leave a comment and let me know what you want to know and about and i will do a video about it but that being said if this brought value to you then please subscribe to this channel also leave a thumb up this will help you that you don't miss any new video and that being said i hope you have a very successful day talk to you soon goodbye johannes you