I’ve just finished five straight days of Excel workshops as part of my data apprenticeship and, honestly, I feel slightly dazed.
Not in a bad way. More in the way your brain feels after spending an entire week trying to reorganise how it thinks.
When the workshop started, I thought I already knew Excel reasonably well. I use it constantly at work. Reports, spreadsheets, formulas, filters and charts. The usual ecosystem of modern office survival. I wasn’t walking in as a complete beginner but, somewhere around day two, I realised there’s a huge difference between using Excel and actually understanding how to think with it. That was the real theme of the week for me and Excel, perhaps unfairly, waits until you’re feeling confident before revealing how much more you’ve got to learn.
Day one: confidence
The first day was comfortable enough. A few refreshers. Some formulas. Some functions I already knew. That reassuring early feeling of “Yes, this what I came for.”
Dangerous feeling, that, because then the workshop gradually started moving beyond simply entering data into spreadsheets and into the logic behind the data itself. Not just “How do I do this?” but “Why am I doing it in this way?” Things had started to become mentally demanding.
Day two: the quiet humbling begins
By the second day, pivot tables arrived properly.
Now, I had used pivot tables before, albeit cautiously and without complete understanding. This time, though, something clicked. I suddenly understood why people love them so much.
You take a huge messy dataset, press a few buttons, move a few fields around, and suddenly the spreadsheet starts answering questions instead of merely storing information. It honestly felt like magic, when I began to understand what Was happening. I realised that Excel is not so much about the spreadsheet. It’s about the structure and logic of the data within. It’s about relationships and answering questions.
Day three: mental fatigue arrives
By the third day, I could feel mental fatigue setting in properly. I was engaged but tiring.
A full-day Excel workshop is surprisingly exhausting because your brain spends hours solving small logical problems continuously. You’re constantly analysing patterns, checking formulas, fixing your mistakes, restructuring data, interpreting charts, troubleshooting errors and trying to understand why one cell has suddenly decided that a date it contains is actually text. Excel has a remarkable ability to make you question your own sanity in tiny increments.
Strangely, the more mentally challenging it became, the more rewarding it felt. My thinking was beginning to change. Rows and columns started looking like systems. Was this neuroplasticity in action?
Day four: formatting is not analysis
One of the biggest things the workshop forced me to confront was how easy it is to confuse formatting with analysis. A spreadsheet can look impressive while telling you absolutely nothing useful.
You can have all of your colours, charts, filters, conditional formatting, branded headers and fancy layouts and still have unreliable data underneath.
That was quite an important moment for me because, in many workplaces, spreadsheets and dashboards are trusted simply because they look organised. The workshop repeatedly emphasised something that now seems obvious. That is that good analysis depends on good structure.
If the underlying data is inconsistent, duplicated, outdated, manually manipulated, or poorly organised, then the output becomes unreliable no matter how polished the dashboard looks.
Day five: Brain melt stage
By the final day, I think everyone in the room was mentally running on fumes. You could almost see the collective processing power deminishing by the hour. People were staring at charts with the thousand-yard stare. Like soldiers returning from battle. Someone would ask “Why is my formula returning an error?” and the whole room would stop whatever they were doing and wait for an answer. You wouldn’t want to miss a nugget of wisdom, however big or small.
Day five was also probably the most satisfying day because by then, I could genuinely feel improvement happening. Things that looked intimidating earlier in the week just made sense. Charts became easier to interpret. Pivot tables became useful instead of confusing. Data structures started feeling logical rather than chaotic. Yes, the logic made all the difference but, Perhaps most importantly, I started to understand that data work is not so much about the software as it is about thinking clearly.
What I’m taking away from the week
Another strange thing is that this workshop has changed the way I look at spreadsheets completely. I’ve started to notice and even look for poor data structure everywhere. Duplicate information and differences in formatting (both very common), Manual workflows where automation is readily available and reports nobody questions because “it’s always been done this way”.
I’m also beginning to notice that data is everywhere, not just at work. We are constantly seeing recommendations (think of Alexa and any of the streaming services), delivery tracking, weather, how traffic is flowing, surveys… I could go on.
I’ve realised that data is not really about numbers. Data is evidence of behaviours, and I think that’s the biggest thing I learned this week.
I learned much in terms of knowledge, skills and behaviours (KSBs) and I’ve also acquired a different way of thinking. That’s why apprenticeship workshops are so mentally tiring. More than teaching you about the software, it rewires your perspective.
Honestly, despite the mental exhaustion, I’m glad it did but, if I see a pie chart in the next 48 hours, I might need to lay down.