MrExcel.com - Your One Stop for Excel Tips & Solutions

Press Quest

10 Interview Questions for MrExcel

  • What is available at the web site, MrExcel.com?

    A: About 200 articles about Excel, and a great message board where over 30,000 Excel questions are answered for FREE each year

  • This is Excel. It's easy. How can anyone make a living doing this??

    A: it is easy to start using Excel, but it is incredibly feature rich. Many never learn the power features and this leads to frustrations and inefficiencies.

  • What percentage of people use Excel's power features??

    A: 1000 people surveyed, 55% never use 9 of the 10 most powerful features

  • What is the most powerful feature of Excel?

    A: Pivot Tables. Used by only 42% of respondents

  • Why are you looking for the messiest Excel problem at the NY Event?

    A: I am on a crusade to end inefficiencies in Excel. My best story so far is taking a 40 hour manual process for a client in Australia and reducing it to a 4 minute process. I am convinced I can shave hours per week off of every one of the 500 million Excel users.

  • What is VBA and how can Excel users get it?

    A: Visual Basic for Applications, and every Excel user already has it. This is the key to automating and saving hours per week

  • Why don't more people use Excel VBA?

    A: It is hard to use. There is a macro recorder, but unlike the Lotus 1-2-3 macro recorder, the recorded macros rarely work right the next day when you have a different number of invoices, etc.

  • Are there any strange uses of Excel?

    A: I was surprised at the creative things people do in Excel. One client was designing quilts in Excel. Another uses Excel for weight loss. Another client has a great application where he actually has his product catalog in Excel and can display pictures of the top 10 selling SKU's at the touch of a button.

  • Any upcoming appearances?

    A: 9/22 episode of TechTV's Call for Help TV show, 3PM Eastern. 9/18 at Borders in Redmond, WA. I'll be in Philly on 10/8, for UNITI-EAST, talking about Data Mining.

  • Do you do work in other Office Products?

    A: I recently purchased TheOfficeExperts.com and their staff of programmers. We now have the capability to handle VBA programming in Access, Word, PowerPoint.

Why Would Anyone Care About This?

  • There are 500 million Excel users.
  • There are a dozen ways to do anything in Excel, and unfortunately, the most obvious way is often not the most efficient. If people would learn how to really use the options on the Data menu, they would be able to cut the time required to do tasks by half or more. My first book, "Guerilla Data Analysis Using Microsoft Excel" covers the ins and outs of the Data menu in detail.
  • Many of the 500 million Excel users get trapped into weekly or monthly Excel hell: having to import files from various systems, sort, slice-n-dice the data to produce reports for their managers. These are my dream customers - we can change that process into a couple of mouse clicks using Excel VBA