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If you want to work in finance, you need to know your way around an Excel spreadsheet. There's absolutely no way around that.
Most analysts spend the majority of their day in the program, working on some project or another, so a thorough knowledge of Excel's basic functions and formatting shortcuts is necessary to completing tasks in a timely manner.
Your potential boss and coworkers will probably assume you already know many of Excel's outwardly simple uses and formatting shortcuts — like pressing the Control, Shift, and 4 keys to convert numerical values into currency — but this isn't intuitive knowledge for beginners.
A primer, like the Microsoft Excel Immersion: From Novice To Ninja course bundle currently listed for $29 on StackSocial, aims to get you comfortable with a range of topics. The GoSkills online course will start by familiarizing you with simpler tasks, like sorting and filtering data and creating charts, and advance to more complicated functions, like formatting pivot tables and finding values within your spreadsheet with VLOOKUP, among other things.
When all is said and done, you should have a much better understanding of Microsoft Excel and its uses outside of an undergraduate statistics class.
Microsoft Excel Immersion: From Novice To Ninja, $29 (originally $497), available at StackSocial.
