how I actually learned Excel after failing for weeks
Hey friends,
When I started learning Excel, I failed.
Not because I wasn’t trying.
I was watching tutorials every night after work.
Taking notes. Memorising formulas.
But after weeks of that I still couldn’t build anything.
Couldn’t answer a single real business question.
Here’s what I got wrong.
The mistake most beginners make
They learn Excel like a vocabulary test.
They memorise SUM.
Then AVERAGE.
Then VLOOKUP.
Function by function. In isolation.
No context. No problem to solve.
That’s not how analysts use Excel.
A real analyst opens Excel with a question.
“Which products made us the most money this quarter?”
“Who are our top salespeople?”
“Where is our sales activity concentrated?”
The formula comes second.
The question comes first.
Here’s what that looks like in practice
Take SUM.
Most tutorials teach it like this:
“SUM adds up numbers. Type =SUM(A1:A10) to add cells A1 through A10.”
That’s technically correct. But it teaches you nothing.
Here’s how an analyst actually thinks about SUM:
The business question: Which products generate the most revenue?
The formula: =SUMIF(C:C, “Wireless Mouse”, G:G)
What it tells you: Total revenue for Wireless Mouse specifically — not just all revenue lumped together.
Now you’re answering something a VP of Sales would actually ask.
That’s the difference between learning a tool and learning to think like an analyst.
The 5 questions every beginner should practice
These are the questions I use to teach Excel from day one:
Which products generate the most revenue? → SUM
What’s our average order performance? → AVERAGE
How many orders came from each region? → COUNT
Who are our top salespeople by name? → VLOOKUP
What does the full picture look like? → Pivot Tables
Five questions. Five functions. One complete analysis.
That’s how a data analyst thinks.
Not formula first. Problem first.
Your action for this week
Pick one dataset. Any dataset.
Google “free sales dataset CSV” and download the first result.
Open it in Excel.
Ask it one question: “Which category has the highest total revenue?”
Write your answer in a sentence:
“Electronics generated the highest revenue at $X, accounting for X% of total sales.”
That sentence — that’s what hiring managers want to see.
Not a list of formulas you know.
Evidence that you can think.
Try it. Reply and tell me what you found.
Talk soon,
Stanley
P.S. — If you want to go deeper, the 5-Day Excel Sprint walks you through exactly this process. One real dataset. Five business questions. A complete portfolio project by Friday. There are still 15 founding member spots left at $37 — after that, the price moves to $67 permanently. [Grab your spot here →] https://stan.store/stanleywangg/p/5day-excel-sprint