is it required to be really good at excel for a IT career

mongoose5697

i know the basics of excel. that's it.

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scaredoftests

It is always good to know more of anything. However, if you are sharp about networking, that is more than an advantage for you.

bpenn

If you arent really good dont worry. You have the option to learn and become really good! I guarantee you many here didnt know much about IT at all when they first started. Many people change careers mid way through their career with little to no experience. The key is to enjoy what you do and if you enjoy IT then you WILL be great at it as long as you keep learning and dont give up.

BlackBeret

No, it's not required to be good at Excel in order to have an IT career. I didn't touch Excel until I moved in to a management/ish role. Depending on what you're doing in IT will determine your requirements. If you're helpdesk and supporting an office environment you probably need to know how to support Microsoft Office products.

markulous

I would say no not at all. I have never heard of someone needing to be an Excel guru to do well in IT.

coreyb80

I didn't really touch Word or Excel except some simple troubleshooting until I landed my current gig on the Service Desk at a Law Firm. I've been here a couple months and learned alot about Word, Excel, and Outlook as well.

techfiend

It really depends on what your role is. Some analysts really need to know excel inside and out. There's also some security positions that are very heavy in excel. Infrastructure and development normally doesn't need to dive into excel.

DoubleNNs

I barely know how to open Excel files, let alone use the application. It is not necessary for IT.

Knowing how to use it may benefit you often, but it is by no means a necessity. I can't really think of any one skill that is necessary for IT, the field is too large.

Danielm7

I've picked up a lot more of excel being in a security role. Need to know how to pivot data, nothing crazy but it makes sorting out large log files worlds easier. With that said as a sysadmin in a former life I used excel in the same way as making a table in Word, and by that I mean barely at all.

si20

Danielm7 wrote: »

I've picked up a lot more of excel being in a security role. Need to know how to pivot data, nothing crazy but it makes sorting out large log files worlds easier. With that said as a sysadmin in a former life I used excel in the same way as making a table in Word, and by that I mean barely at all.

Same here...

OP - take a Microsoft course in excel. Very cheap and will teach you everything you need. Even a pivot table as Daniel describes - it's just ONE CLICK of a button to pivot data. Very, very, very little skill required.

alan2308

You won't last long in the government without being pretty good with Excel.

Deathmage

I use excel for documentation, that's about it...

Mike7

Danielm7 wrote: »

I've picked up a lot more of excel being in a security role. Need to know how to pivot data, nothing crazy but it makes sorting out large log files worlds easier. With that said as a sysadmin in a former life I used excel in the same way as making a table in Word, and by that I mean barely at all.

Was involved in application development project where business users want all sorts of reports. We exported the data to Excel and demo-ed pivot tables and pivot graphs. Requirements met. Happy users.

The department head later sent the entire team to a 5-day advanced Excel course.

mongoose5697

So pretty much. If you have s basic knowledge of excel your fine.

inscom.brigade

as some have stated, it will depend on the size of the network. you won't last long in gov = enterprise level, enterprise level requires excel. I watched a Lynda.com excel video, it was more than enough for me.

pevangel

Not necessary, but there are many benefits with being really good at Excel if you work in IT.

We use excel to create templates that the rest of our team can use for device configuration and circuit provisioning. Just fill in a few details and it generates the configs for you.

kly630

not really, although when I did ERP consulting I used it quite a bit to clean data before uploading it into an SQL server database, since I only had small amounts of data coming from peachtree or quickbooks.

If you can do vlookups, pivot tables and record macros, you're solid. And that's only really if you have a career that's going to involve more programming or database work.

zcarenow

mongoose5697 wrote: »

i know the basics of excel. that's it.

If you decide to become an IT Project Coordinator or Project Manager, then you need to know more than just basics.

OctalDump

FWIW, I know someone that pretty much made a career out of "being good at Excel", which I think is a sad indictment on the IT world generally.

But the answer to your question is "No", although a lot of help desk roles expect you to know this stuff (Word, Excel, PowerPoint) better than their users and if you do have great skills and can communicate them, it might be enough to get you kicked upstairs and probably into a role where you won't use those skills much.

Dojiscalper

I have seen pretty much what everyone else has said. No, with the exception of knowing enough about it to help end users identify why something isn't working in general, ie selecting the correct printer settings. I use it a bit in field service, but I'm tracking stuff and creating reports with it, ie mileage, expenses. I still use it more at home though.