How to get quicker at Excel and PowerPoint for Consulting

Dear A,

Congratulations to your offer!

It would be helpful for you to learn the business-focused Excel features.

In business, about 80% of your work will come from 20% of the functionality of the Microsoft Excel.

The core skills of a competent business Excel user are something like:

• Formatting & basic formulas
• Mouse-free Excel navigation
• Vlookups & conditional statements
• Data analysis - filtering, sorting, and analyzing data
• Data visualization - tables, charts, and dual axis charts
• What-if-analysis
• Pivot tables

If you can do these things, you’ll outperform 95% of people in the workplace.

To learn these concepts, you could:

• Learn the concepts online for free
• Take an online course

If you’re looking for something free, I’d recommend Googling & Youtube-ing those topics on my list. Tons of free material online. On Udemy you can also find some courses.

If you’re short on time, take a short business-focused online course.

I’d recommend the following business-focused course focused on mastering the 20% of functions that make up 80% of Excel work.

Best,

André

Training the street has online offering that is really solid (used for the people who report to me): https://www.ttsuniversity.com/Default.aspx

Another good one is ozgrid.com: http://www.ozgrid.com/

Hope it helps,

Andrea

(edited)

Hi Anonymous,

congratulations for your offer! As mentioned, you will get a lot of training on both at the beginning; Vlad mentioned some additional good resources. In terms of Excel, I would just add one tip – try to master VLookUp and Pivot Tables – they will be some of the main tools you would use.

If you want to properly prepare, I would not consider technical skills only though. Consulting is a people business and can be highly stressful time to time, thus, would be equivalent important to prepare on:

• Communication and people skills: a classic on the topic is the book “How to win friends and influence people” by Dale Carnegie. If you can have any kind of sales experience before that would also help a lot (a lot more than reading-only)
• Stress management. I recommend “The Secret” by Rhonda Byrne.

For the long term these skills are actually more important then the technical ones.

A couple of things that could help you during your first weeks are instead the following:

1. Take notes when your manager tells you something – this will help you to remember details and will show you care about them to the team.
2. Align frequently with your manager on priorities and deadlines. Chances are you will always have too many things to do. Either you learn which things go first or you will risk to sleep very few hours in your first weeks ;)
3. Ask for feedback every two-three weeks – this will show you are proactive and willing to learn.
4. Always double check. First impression is very important in consulting: if you show you are reliable from the beginning, you will create a reputation of a reliable person.
5. Ask for help when you don't know what to do – better to let know you are in trouble with meeting a deadline then missing the deadline.
6. Be social and respectful with the support staff – these people are great and influential as well in the company.
7. Start to build a weekly calendar the Sunday before. Allocate main tasks, both for private life and work. Will be though to do at the beginning but once you master this skill your productivity will skyrocket, as will force to think about your priorities a lot in advance.

Hope this helps,

Francesco

Agreed with other response: enjoy your free time, you will be given all the training needed and all the practice/exercise needed - sometimes more than you'd like :).

On PowerPoint the golden rule is that less words is best.

On Excel the only strong advice I can give, if you want to become a ninja, is not to buy or use a mouse. Ever. The moment you have it, it will be your crutch.

hope it helps,

andrea

Hey,

My 2 cents on the topic (especially on the powerpoint piece): if by any chance that consulting firm is McKinsey, I would strongly reccommend you to read "Say it with Charts" and "Say it with Presentation" (Gene Zelazny, a VA who has been with McKinsey for the last decades); these books are given in the initial training and contain everything you need to know about ppt... all the rest comes with practice and experience.

Anyway, my personal view (and it worths what it worths, as it is no fact, but just something built on my own personal experience as well as hundreds of McK colleagues that knew zero about excel/ppt in the day 0, and most of the people excels after 1 year) is that if I was in your position, I wouldn't spend much time worrying about these topics and would rather enjoy free time in general before getting into the buble called consulting :)

Best

Bruno

Agreed with other response: enjoy your free time, you will be given all the training needed and all the practice/exercise needed - sometimes more than you'd like :).

On PowerPoint the golden rule is that less words is best.

On Excel the only strong advice I can give, if you want to become a ninja, is not to buy or use a mouse. Ever. The moment you have it, it will be your crutch.

hope it helps,

andrea

Hi there

I would recommend actually an investment banking / PE recruitment guide like WallStreetOasis or Breaking Into Wall Street.

What you'd want to look for is any online modules or exercises that guides you through building a model for a business - I am fairly sure Breaking Into Wall Street has one about building an income forecast model.

Jack