Did you know that 95% of the people in your office can’t do the simplest things in Excel, like:

• Make a grade school-level multiplication table
• Write a formula other than SUM or AVERAGE
• Use a VLOOKUP or an IF function
• Make a graph or chart for a presentation
• Sort a table of DATA without messing it up
• Actually print something without blank pages coming out!

After being one of Wall Street’s most coveted Excel trainers and consultants for over a decade, one thing I know for sure is that while almost everyone in the workplace is USING Excel, very few are using it properly. In fact, I would go so far as to say that almost NOBODY KNOWS EXCEL.

But everyone knows how to make a big MESS. Right? You probably have a messy spreadsheet open right now. And worst of all, you’re actually using it for your job! LOL!! I know, it’s not your fault. Your probably inherited it from someone else. You open it every morning and then you want to DIE. Does it look like this?

Yep. Most spreadsheets I see are absolute DISASTERS. Here’s why:

1. They look like CRAP. There are too many lines, colors, merged cells, wrapped text, missing rows, and WAY too many tabs.
2. They don’t work. It was probably made by that guy who left your team…and it’s impossible to tell why formulas are no longer working. Many cells say things like #N/A or #REF.
3. They SUCK. If even it works fine now, something will go wrong soon and you’ll have to find your company “Excel expert” to fix the formulas.
4. They are hard to update. Adding new rows/accounts/things feels like surgery. Maybe you are even entering the numbers manually… with your HAND!
5. They require you to take several steps each week to maintain (if they even work at all). You are constantly making new band-aids to fix things.
6. They are SLOW. Some take several seconds or ever minutes to open! Your computer stops responding... is it crashing? Will it come back? Hahahah...
7. Worst of all, you have no idea if the numbers are right. And it’s impossible to troubleshoot.

Most companies, behind their pretty façade, are operating on the brink of disaster. I see it all the time. People are emailing each other different broken versions of the same workbook, all saved and modified in different ways, all with broken links and inconsistent data.

Oftentimes when something changes, there are 10-20 other workbooks at the company that are no longer “correct”. Someone then has to open each workbook to fix them.

Yes, there was that one girl who linked several workbooks to each other with VLOOKUPS. But of course she has left the company and we’re not sure where those files are now. Also, why are there so many formulas that say #N/A? And what about this random hidden section? Where did these numbers come from? Were they typed? Are they correct?

One time a client said to me “It’s like we’re keeping track of our company on a cocktail napkin”. I didn’t disagree.

But what about our fancy new “system”?

Oh, your office just paid $500,000 for a back-end “system” that’s supposed to solve all of these problems? Hahahahha! Let me guess: It doesn’t really do anything, because like all systems, the system SUCKS.
So you end up:

1. Logging into the system
2. “Pulling” the raw data into Excel
3. Sorting and Filtering the SHIT out of it
4. Re-grouping several categories that have the wrong labels (like when Ft. Lauderdale must grouped in with Miami).
5. Re-typing things so that you don’t have 3 different spellings of the same phrase in your report, like “NYC”, “New York City” and “NY City”
6. Waiting for someone in IT to fix the system so it no longer behaves this way
7. Still wanting to DIE

Every office I have ever visited has this problem. Think about many wasted hours are spent by all of the employees at every company in the WORLD, each day, each month, and each year, all because they have a garbage workflow based on the exchange of poorly designed Excel workbooks.

How many hours have you wasted at your job? If you’re in Excel for at least 3 hours a day, I would bet that 2 of those hours are being wasted on tedious manual tasks that could have been avoided had you learned Excel properly.

2 hours a day

10 hours a week

500 hours a year…..

Wow, that’s 20 full days of your life each year that you’ll never get back. I would much rather spend that time on the beach drinking a beer. How much more time do you want to waste? How much money and time has been wasted on our planet because of this? Billions of dollars. Millions of human work years. Gone.

The solution is NOT to simply learn the features in Excel. The key, as you probably guessed from reading above, is in learning how to DESIGN SPREADSHEETS PROPERLY. Yes, by learning a few key principles, you can transform your spreadsheets from MESSY DISASTERS into elegant tools, dashboards, and templates that actually solve problems!

Building proper spreadsheets requires a certain discipline that does NOT come naturally to most people. If it did, everyone would be a great spreadsheet designer. Using Excel the right way also requires you to actually learn some shortcuts so you’re not wasting time fiddling with the mouse when you could have pressed F2.

There are over 500 shortcuts in Excel. There are hundreds of functions in Excel. And just like painting a picture, there are millions of ways you can design a spreadsheet. How do you know where to start? 

Lucky for you, I figured it out. I have packed all of this knowledge into a 4 hour course! I’m not kidding. It turns out that you don’t need to learn all of the features in Excel to understand the principles of proper design. You only need to focus on the most important 5% of Excel. Shortcuts, VLOOKUPs, Pivot Tables, and a handful of key concepts. You will use these same tools 95% of the time! They call this the 80/20 but in Excel it’s more like 95/5.

That’s why my course is just 4 hours. Not 10 hours. Not a huge book that you will never read. Just 4 HOURS. Let’s face it. If it was 20 hours- it would just be TOO DAMN LONG. And you probably wouldn’t even want to do it. I also would not want to be speaking for 20 hours! I’d much rather be sitting at a blackjack table slamming an EXTRA DIRTY martini. In fact, my #1 rule in class is to never work. Say it to yourself:

“Never WORK”

Good, you’re already learning the first lesson in class. Why work if you can set up a template to do your work for you? I have countless clients whose lives have been transformed because I turned their job into a BUTTON. They push the button, it opens up a template, it processes their data, it saves a new colorful sexy dashboard as a PDF file, it opens Outlook, sends it to their boss… and they can spend their extra time doing things that are actually important. Like CHILLING.  

My core class, the “Life or Death Class”, is an adaptation of the very same course I used to teach for over a decade on Wall Street. It was such a sensation it made me famous in that world. Sometimes I’ll be walking down Broadway and some frat-boy will run up and say “Dude, you’re Excel Mike! You changed my life when I started my analyst job at Goldman”. I usually don’t remember what happens after that because we usually drop into a bar and starting pounding picklebacks. They remember ME though - not only because they learned more in my 1-day class than they did drinking for 4 years in college, but because my class is AWESOME and DOESN’T SUCK.
 

The reason my class has been such a smashing success: 

1. It is short and fun
2. You don’t have to take notes - I send you mine!
3. It makes sense even to normal people (no need to be a computer nerd)
4. The examples are EASY. It’s not about finance.
5. It is tremendously useful and will change the way you work forever
6. You will realize how much you’ve been doing WRONG in Excel
7. Did I mention it is not boring?

You will learn more in these 4 hours than you probably learned in college. Do you remember any of it? And unlike college, you will actually USE THIS STUFF EVERY DAY. It will change your entire workflow, get you countless hours of your life back, and quite possible transform your career. I can’t tell you how many former students have written to me telling me “I am saving hours a day”. It always makes my day.

For a limited time, I'm actually personally running these classes LIVE on ZOOM since most people are working from home these days.

My 4-hour Life-Or-Death Class is probably the most important class you’ll ever take during your adult life. Yes, I know that may sound strong, but once you automate 1/2 of your day into a button, you'll never want to go back. Never work.

I hope to see you in class!

Sincerely,

Excel Mike