What employers mean by 'must know Excel'

Be able to name the five things that phrase actually stands for.

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Almost every office job advert in Pakistan asks for Excel. Almost none says what for.

Having read a great many of them, it comes down to five things:

1. Getting data in cleanly — pasting from a system, from a PDF, from WhatsApp, without everything landing in one column.

2. Formulas that answer a question — not fifty formulas, about six.

3. Finding one thing inside many — matching an order number against a price list.

4. Summarising — turning four thousand rows into the six numbers a manager wants.

5. Presenting — a sheet somebody else can open and understand without ringing you.

That is the whole job. Macros, VBA and Power Query are real skills and almost never what the advert means. If you can do those five reliably you are ahead of most applicants, and you can learn all five in an afternoon each.

Exercise — try it yourself

Find three real job adverts in Pakistan that mention Excel. For each, write down which of the five things above the role would actually need. Notice how often the advert does not say.

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Continue to lesson 2 Up next 2. Getting messy data into a usable shape