Excel Exclusively for Engineers…
Let’s Summarise the Problem:
Excel is versatile and tempting to use.
It has great flexibility. You can enter almost any formula. To dismiss it as an accounting program is to seriously underestimate it.
There are many features we engineers can use: Matrix functions, curve fitting, statistical analysis, square root, logarithms, raising to a power, Imaginary and Complex numbers, charts, pivot tables, goal seek, macros… the list goes on.
How many of these do you know how to use in Excel?
This very flexibility is also dangerous…
It is easy to make mistakes.
For example:
In 2012, JP Morgan was hit with a $6 billion trading loss due to an Excel copy-and-paste error
Financial giant J.P. Morgan’s infamous London Whale debacle was caused by none other than an Excel user error. The company was using spreadsheets to create value-at-risk (VaR) models, and an employee copied the wrong information from one spreadsheet and pasted it into another. The resulting model grossly understated the company’s risk and was a major factor in its $6 billion trading loss.
In 2010, MI5 bugged the wrong phones due to a spreadsheet formatting error
A formatting error on MI5’s list of phones to be tapped resulted in the agency’s tapping 134 people entirely unrelated to investigations. The formatting error changed the last three digits of these phone numbers to 000 within the spreadsheet. As a result, random British citizens had their phones tapped by their government while the suspects went unobserved.
In 2003, TransAlta lost $24 million due to an Excel copy-and-paste error
Canadian power company TransAlta lost $24 million when an employee misaligned the rows in an Excel spreadsheet. The copy-and-paste error led to bids being aligned with the wrong contracts, wiping out 10% of TransAlta’s profit for the year with a quick click.
Let’s Summarise the Problem:
Excel isn’t taught to Engineers at universities. A general Excel course makes a great starter but doesn’t focus on Engineering. Mostly, you are expected to pick it up on your own. Who has the time to search for things you don’t even know are there? Wouldn’t it be good to at least have an idea of the possibilities?
Then, many Excel users are not aware of the common errors they can be making. Even an intelligent engineer like you can be making mistakes: Errors that can cause your dam to collapse, your bridge to fail, your spacecraft to crash. This won’t merely put you behind your peers; it will ruin your promising career.
Excel won’t display all your mistakes. There are tools you can use, but –again– you have to know about them first. And then apply them.
Ultimately, you have to spot the mistakes yourself. But our mind plays tricks: It will read back to you what you meant to write, not what is really there. This is why it is so hard to proofread your own work.
But luckily for you, there’s now a solution to your problem!
Introducing… the “Excel for Engineers” course.
Software Africa’s “Excel for Engineers” course Helps You:
- Always start right –with Good Worksheet Design.
- Get confident with Formula-building, including when to use $, and when it will break your copy.
- Discover Advanced Functions you never knew existed.
- Tame powerful number-crunching Tools like Outlines, Pivot Tables, Scenario Manager, Goal Seek and Solver.
- Crack the secrets of Iterating for a solution when you can’t solve it directly.
- Save time and support your team by automating repetitive operations with robust Macros.
- Squeeze more out of other programs by using Excel as a Pre- and Post-Processor.
- Master shortcuts to increase your efficiency, which means you’ll save hours later…
…and much, MUCH more!
To learn more about the “Excel for Engineers” self-paced online course, and to enrol, click this button:
That’s great, but I don’t have the self-discipline to work through a self-paced online course. Do you have an alternative?
You bet! How about a live course? Still online, but with a live instructor? Four once-weekly live online sessions via Zoom. Each session is 3 hours in a morning or afternoon, depending on your time zone. We schedule these according to demand, so you need to ask. While you do pay more for live personal instruction, it’s still very affordable for engineers in the US, Canada, the UK, and Europe.
Then, we can get more specialized…
If you’d like to focus on macros, get started with our online self-paced Quick ‘n Easy Turbo-Start Excel Macros course:
What else would you like to focus on? Pivot Tables? Charts? Scenario Manager? Iteration? Gantt Charts? Using Excel as a pre- or post-processor? Advanced Macros? Please tell us what you want!