Showcasing the skills in the best and most relevant way is what really counts, right?
Office Suite was launched by Microsoft on Nov 10, 1990. You all are pretty familiar with Outlook, MS Word, Excel, and PowerPoint – all of these applications are a significant part of this Office Suite.
MS Excel application helps businesses, professionals, and students with compiling their data, making spreadsheets, applying formulas, creating graphs, and much more.
Not every job seeker would consider inculcating MS Word advanced skills or excel skills for resume. Professions like retail managers, accountants, cost estimators, data journalists, and etc. require mastery in Excel skills.
Thus formulating a solid excel skills section for resume; supported by facts, description, and evidence; is a fine way to demonstrate yourself as an ideal candidate for the vacant position.
Related: How to Write a Double Major on ResumeProfessional Benefits of MS Excel Skills
Let’s look into the significance of this spreadsheet program before shedding light on how to list excel skills on a resume:
| Formatting options | Highlight Italics Bold Font Color Fill Underline Bullets These are some of the many formatting options available to MS Excel users. This helps users, professionals, and businesses, to differentiate the data. |
| Charts for Visualization of Data | To present the numerical data in a visual way, MS Excel allows making charts. This option is in the Inserts Tab. For instance, to present 60% and 40% share of orange and lemon juice respectively; businesses may use a pie chart. |
| Easy Arithmetic Solutions | The company’s sales, statements, and debit/ credit sheets become handy utilizing Excel formulas and functions. “There are 350+ formulas and functions in MS excel" It takes less than a second to apply these functions to the entire row or column. |
| Printing Facility | Once the data is compiled and organized, you may also share it with your colleagues using printed versions. Prior to printing, you can adjust margins, page orientations, and paper size, etc. |
| Data Compilation | With such a huge amount of space; a user can import data, insert pictures, and apply functions wherever necessary. “There are 1,048,576 rows and 16,384 columns in an Excel spreadsheet with labeling”. |
Microsoft Excel Skills
Some of these skills which you may include in the professional document could be:
- Spreadsheets
- Data Linking
- Pivot Tables
- Charts
- Workbooks
- Macros and Automatization (VBA)
- IF Statements
- Data Validation
- Formulas (LEN, COUNTA, Max, Min)
- Data Analysis
Details of some of these are:
Charts and Graphs
Data sets gathered by the wok team can be made visually understandable using excel charts and graphs. These can:
Display Trends and Patterns
Bar, line, and area charts can reveal any trends, if they were hidden/ unknown in the numerical data. Data like weather trends, shopping trends are typically unraveled using charts and graphs.
Data Aggregation
How a company’s and its competitor stock performed last year; instead of a puzzling data situation – charts can help you arrange the company and its competitor performance.
This not only aggregates data into small space but also helps you in a convenient comparison overtime points.
Communicating Data Sets
Percentages, proportions, and ratios are easy to demonstrate via excel charts.
Pivot Tables
Data can be summarized, reorganized, and condenses via pivot tables.
- They are user-friendly.
- Tables are quick. Formulas and functions can be applied, edited, and removed in a second.
- Giant-sized data can be condensed with pivot tables, so the data analysis becomes interactive.
Excel Formulas and Functions
AND
This logical function in Excel shows whether a certain thing is TRUE or FALSE. E.g.: =AND(P1=”DONUT”, A2<5). It would be TRUE if the P1 cell is DONUT and A2 is less than 5.
VLOOKUP
In case the spreadsheet is filled with data. This allows you to locate specific data and transfer/ shift/ move to other excel spreadsheets.
DAYS
- =DAYS(SELECT CELL, SELECT CELL)
- =NETWORKDAYS(SELECT CELL, SELECT CELL,[numberofholidays])
As the name indicates, the DAYS function determines the no. of days between two chosen dates. Useful for assessing revenue length, contracts tenure, and lifecycle of items.
Network Days function counts workdays only. The function in the second bullet allows you to count holidays as well!
Jobs which Require MS Excel Skills
Like advanced Microsoft word skills are specifically demanded by some job positions, the following jobs give special weightage to proficiency in MS Excel skills:
- Administrative Assistant
- Accountants
- Financial Analyst
- Project Manager
- Retail Manager
- Business Analyst
- Data Journalist
- Cost Estimator
When to Consider Including Excel Skills on a Resume?
When it’s required by the job/ hiring manager and your skills are above intermediate levels!
To exhibit that you are proficient in Microsoft Office in your resume; you can polish these skills via courses, certifications, training, and YouTube videos.
How to describe excel skills on resume?
Be Honest
Filling out the portions in a resume, you gotta be honest. Because if you are not, you are very likely to get stuck in the interview setting.
- You may be asked questions like:
- Describe the COUNTA function of Excel?
- Describe your experience using Microsoft Word?
- How Excel can help highlighting trends/ patterns in data sets?
If a position requires hardcore excel proficiency, you are bound to master this skill to later include in your resume.
Be Specific
The resume reader takes only 6 seconds prior to deciding whether he is accepting the resume or rejecting it.
Therefore, be very specific when adding info in the resume section. If you want them to know you are good in Excel – you may say something like Advanced knowledge of MS Excel including Data Tables, Pivot Tables, VLOOKUP, Excel Functions and Formulas, Charts and Graphs.
Give Examples | Describe your Achievements
It’s quite easy to say that I am good at this, or I’m good at that. To solidify your claim, support your statement with any experience or accomplishment from your past job/ internship/ education time.
For instance,
Formulated a financial model for ABC Company utilizing advanced Excel features including tables and Excel functions like INDEX, VLOOKUP, IRR, NPV
What to Put in the Resume Skills Section?
All excel skills and relevant achievements would be covered in this section of your resume. You have to be honest, practical, and smart in doing so to get the hiring manager’s recognition.
What you should cover in the Resume Experience Section?
Choose the most advanced excel skills for the resume experience section.
How to list excel skills on resume?
Like all other resume sections, this portion should be formatted/ tailored with the details given in the job ad.
Some ways this could be accomplished are:
- Planned a bunch of helpful Excel macros that automated manual cycles. This mushroomed my team’s potency by 17%.
- Utilized Excel pivot tables to order necessary organization information and reports.
- Decreased overstock by 19% by utilizing Excel formulas and functions to format company’s spreadsheet data.
Include Excel Courses and Certifications
In addition to the skills, you may include courses/ certifications you’ve taken in the Excel program for advancement.
These are usually entered in Education/ Skills section. This could be a university course or an online certification.
For instance,
“Certification in Financial Modeling and Valuation from PPP University.”
