Today I’m covering a topic that’s close to my heart for a few reasons, while this might not reflect the normal tone of this site, I hope that a number of you would find it interesting regardless.

Considering my career as a web developer and to some extent webmaster, I’ve always been spending hours every day in front of the computer. With me having begun my foray into Machine Learning with OpenCV2 and Recurrent Neural Networks with Python, I consider myself adept at most software.

However, the one program that has always scared me was for the longest time Excel. This piece of software I first learned about back in 1999 or 2000 when I was still in school. Our teacher was not able to teach us anything at all, looking at the manual himself. So my first experience with this spreadsheet monster was not a positive one, and unlike Word, I felt in over my head with the options and functions that was to offer.

I did not particularly need to know about Excel spreadsheets in detail at the time, so I went on with my programming life, playing with HTML, PHP and other such basic coding languages. Once I got a job however, it became clear that I could no longer avoid learning more about the software. So I bought a Dummy’s book about it. Not that it helped at all, at the time there was so little good and relevant information in those types of books. So I learned by trial and error eventually, all the while wishing that there’d been a proper course about Microsoft Office’s Excel out there.

Fast forward 17 years or so, I now have a son who just asked me to teach him Excel for his math work at school. All that information I learned back then had long since been forgotten, so once more I was horrified at the prospect of learning Excel, and even more so – teaching my son.

However, in our modern day and age there are no limits to the possibilities and benefits of online Excel courses, and a Google search revealed that there were a few candidates out there. The one I ended up with, and would recommend is a site called Earn and Excel, and their blog posts resonated with me somehow, and reflect my own philosophy to some extent.

Like in all types of courses, and studies in general, you have to take it seriously and stay focused. It helps knowing exactly what it is you want to learn as well, and not just expect to become a master of the entire spreadsheet all at once. So when I was reading about how to ensure success for my son in his online endeavor, I came across a post by Sohail from Earn and Excel that covered all my concerns in one single post.

It doesn’t matter if you pay for a course or if it’s free, if you follow the advice from the post linked to above, I’m sure your results will be much better than if you had not.

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