Oz is one of the best creators of Excel content I know with his Excel on Fire YouTube channel. Unlike traditional "how-to" videos, his videos blend education with entertainment making the learning process feel like binging your favorite Netflix show. Oz and I met on Google+ way back in the day and in person at the 2014 Modeloff competition. While Oz is an Excel MVP and Excel trainer on LinkedIn, our conversation goes deeper into data literacy and understanding where your data is coming from before it gets into the spreadsheet.

Know just enough Excel to get your job done

When I first met Oz at the Modeloff in 2014, he told me a story about how he discovered the power of Excel for changing people's lives. This story really shows the human side of a spreadsheet program that is typically associated with business and enterprise use.

Oz was teaching Excel at a medical school and helping the students in his class automate their reports. He met one student who was simply copying and pasting cells up and down the spreadsheet, and was spending an hour doing these manual operations. He realized the student just needed one formula to automate the task she was doing, she just didn't know what that formula was.

I started learning about people who needed to know how to use certain features in Excel, but didn't need to know how to learn how to use everything in Excel.

Once the student saw how the formula could eliminate all the tedious work she was doing, it changed how she worked and gave her so much more time to focus on more important aspects of her job.

I think a lot of people approach their tools and software with a similar mindset. You know there is probably a better or faster way of doing something, but you go with what you know. There's a bit of the JTBD (jobs-to-be-done) framework here. Knowledge workers need to know just enough to solve the problems they face on the job, and can leave the rest of the software's feature set for the power users.

You'll work with data no matter what role you have

Prior to our conversation, Oz mentioned to me he wanted to talk about more than just Excel tips and tricks. These topics are covered at nauseum by other content creators; and for good measure as people need and want this training (yours truly has benefited from creating this type of content). What really tickles my fancy are the topics surrounding Excel, and there is no one better to go in-depth with me on these topics than Oz.

Analyst might not be in your title.

Nonetheless, you are or will be sorting, filtering, and summarizing data no matter what department or level your work in. Excel is merely a tool to get you from the raw data to the story you tell to your internal stakeholders to launch X feature or to external clients to purchase your product.

Oz talks about how people taking an Excel class will get them feeling comfortable about using the tool, but it only goes so far. As you get real world experience, you'll start to ask questions about data quality and the data source(s). These are topics that go beyond Excel and into the realm of databases, data transformation, and data pipelines; topics I'm trying to cover more of on this podcast.

Oz opined about the dilemma one faces with duplicate data. Do you de-duplicate at the source (perhaps in a view in a database) or do you do it in the spreads...