 So tip number one is master the fundamentals. Now what do I mean by master the fundamentals? Well, mastering the fundamentals is, in my opinion, the most important because people don't really, they just jump into Excel. So let me jump into Excel and see what that looks like. So let's see, let me go to a screen here. Let's say my entire screen and share. So I'll put up my screen. So this is Excel. So when I say master the fundamentals, you have to understand how this software was built. And Excel is such a wonderful tool. And it's also a big problem for many people because it allows you to do anything. See these cells, they allow you to do anything. And when you try to understand Excel, you understand everything is like an object. So you have a sheet. Or let's even start with a workbook. This entire thing is a workbook. So the workbook has sheets. And your sheets can be many. Sheets one, sheet two, you can add as many sheets as you like, right here down in the bottom. Then every, that's the sheets. Now every sheet has cells. And the most fundamental thing of working with Excel is working with cells. And I always say, if it's not in Excel, in Excel, it is not Excel. So that's the key thing I say. If it's not in Excel, in Excel, it's not Excel. And if you want to work with Excel, you must work with a cell. So how many cells do we have in Excel? Well, we have 17 billion cells in a sheet. So a single sheet has 17 billion cells, right? How do you know this? It's a simple formula. You could do equals to row. I just say equals to, I just say equals to row, tab. I go to the last row, right, close my bracket. And I multiply that by column, tab. And I go hold my control key, go to the last column and close my bracket and enter. So this will give me the rows and columns. And if I just do a quick format, you see that we have 17 billion cells in a single sheet. So the fundamentals of Excel, to me they're divided into two. When you're using Excel, Excel is an analysis tool. So analysis tool, so Excel is an analysis tool. So I always say, okay, so the guys that use Excel are definitely analysts, yeah? So analysts use Excel. So analysts, I'm spelling this right, it doesn't look right, analysts, I guess. So analysts use Excel. So if analysts use Excel, right, then what do they use Excel for? To me, I think they use Excel for two main things. They use Excel to do reporting and analytics. That's what I think they use Excel for. They use Excel for reporting and analytics. And they use Excel for forecasting. So modeling and forecasting, yeah, or forecasting. So to me, those are the two main, how would I call it? The two main reasons for using Excel, right? There's two main reasons for using Excel. Reporting analytics and forecasting, right? So if those are the two reasons for using Excel, what are the things under reporting analytics and forecasting, how do you do that properly? And that's what we're gonna look at. So the fundamentals in my opinion, let me just make this, I'm just trying to make this all look nice and neat because I'm to put something to the left, so I'm gonna merge cells. This is a bad practice, by the way. When you're doing data, you should never merge cells, but I'm just gonna break my best practices just briefly, okay, so that I can merge this too, right? So for reporting analytics, what do you need? What do you need? Yeah, and so what do you really need for reporting analytics? That's my question, what do you need? Yeah, to me, I think you only need three sheets. You only need three sheets. So you need one, data sheet, two, control sheet, and three, a report sheet. So you need data, control report. Those are the three main things you need for reporting analytics, and then for when it comes to modeling and forecasting, so before you use your tools, what else do you need? What do you need for modeling and forecasting? In my opinion, again, you also need three things, right? What do you need? You need three things. You need one, you need inputs, two, you need calculations, or a calculation sheet, or calculations, or just a calculations in general, and then three, you need outputs, right? So these are the three things. So if you have inputs, calculations, outputs, then you have all the analysis that you need. The modeling and forecasting is like going to the future. So I think this is future focus, right? This is future. You're looking at the future here, right? And here you're looking at the past, yeah? You're looking at past data and future data. This is looking at the past. So those are the two fundamentals. These are the fundamentals of using Excel. So when you're trying to use Excel, you ask yourself, okay, am I looking at the past? Am I doing reporting on past data? Am I looking at the future, trying to forecast and advise people on the future? And that's why I think these are the two main reasons you use Excel. So this is use Excel for either reporting and analytics or use Excel for modeling and forecasting. And modeling and forecasting and reporting analytics eventually kind of come together. You can look at the past data and help you forecast the future. And really what is machine learning? So that's MI, machine learning is what machine learning and AI, official intelligence, all that is looking at patterns in the past to hopefully predict the future. So that's Excel in a nutshell, really. That is how Excel works. Now, what there are some rules for using data properly, some rules to control sheet to control how users use your reports. And even your reports, there are really four ways to build your reports. There's formulas and functions and pivot tables in old Excel. And then as well, pivot tables in new Excel using the power tools which are gonna talk about and also using formulas with the power tools or using formulas with DAX, using cube formulas. So those are the four ways you use Excel or you build reports. Formulas and functions, pivot tables. Then pivot tables with power pivot and DAX, that's number three. And then cube formulas using an OLAP cube, OLAP. OLAP is online analytical processing and your pivot table is an OLAP. So it gives you access to cube formulas in Excel. Many of us don't know about these cube formulas. They've been there for a while. If you go to equals to cube, you will see that there are quite a few cube formulas. But that's like that. So that's how you master Excel. These are the fundamentals, right? If it's not in Excel in Excel, it's not Excel. And to work with Excel, you need to work with Excel. And what are you doing with Excel? Are you doing reporting analytics? Are you doing modeling and forecasting? And if you're doing modeling and forecasting, you better have inputs clearly spelled out in separate cells, calculations in separate cells, outputs in separate cells. That way it opens you up to use excellent tools. Like if I come to my data, for example, I have forecasting tools here, what if analysis, all these tools open up to you for forecasting. What if this happens? What if that happens? Those open up to you when you use Excel properly for future, for the analysis of things that haven't happened. Things that have happened, you need to store your data, control and report only three sheets. So let's jump back to the slides. So that's step one, that's number one. Fundamentals understand the fundamentals.