There are many analytical tools data analysts can include in their toolbox. Excel continues to be a common tool for many. Which Excel functions do you have experience using? Describe in detail how you used Excel for one of your analytical projects.
Excel is by far the most utilized tool in the field of data analytics. Interviewers will ask you several questions about this topic to determine your expertise using this tool. They are interested in your expertise in both the basic functionality of Excel and your ability to use more advanced techniques within the tool. They expect you to provide examples for both of these.
"As a data analyst, I have used Excel almost on a daily basis. It has become an essential tool for me in all phases of my analytical projects. I have used Pivot tables to check and clean data sets as well as analyze them. In the analysis phase, I have also used statistical functions to calculate standard deviations, correlation coefficients, percentiles, and quartiles. In addition, I have used the graphing function in Excel to develop visual summaries of the data. As an example, I regularly worked on customer satisfaction surveys and received raw data from external vendors. I would take this data and bring it into Excel and use sort functions and pivot tables to verify the data was clean and loaded correctly. As part of the analysis phase, I always worked with pivot tables to segment the data. In addition, if the analysis called for it, I used the statistical functions I mentioned earlier. Building tables and graphs in Excel allowed me to tie my analyses together visually. Many times, I could complete the tasks in one file, making everything I worked on easily accessible."
If you are an Excel expert, it would be difficult to list all the functions you have experience using. Instead, concentrate on highlighting the more difficult ones, particularly statistical functions. If you have experience utilizing the more challenging functions, hiring managers will presume you have experience using the more basic ones. Be sure to highlight your pivot table skills, as well as your ability to create graphs in Excel. If you have not attained these skills yet, investing in training to learn them is worthwhile.
