Today AAPicks have had our heads turned by an Excel eLearning package aimed at… well…. everyone . On your resume, does it say something like ‘ Proficient in Microsoft Word and Excel ’? Once upon a time mine did. I did a stint in the finance sector, spent plenty of time coloring the boxes and making spreadsheets that looked good on a printout. I’d even dabbled in the equations bar sometimes – I basically thought I had it down. How wrong I was. When I applied for a role which involved Excel proper, the competency test chewed me up and spat me out . All I can now remember from that traumatic episode was that it involved pivot-table look-ups and macros. Excel is so much more powerful a tool than I had realized at the time. It has functions for complex data analysis and all kinds of statistical modelling. Little wonder it’s used by pretty much every single organization on the planet. How wrong I was. Whether you’...