Excel, Excel, and more Excel
As I have written about in many of my previous blogs, I feel that one of the main advantages of the Fisher MAcc compared to other MAcc programs around that state is that students are basically allowed to enroll in whatever courses we are interested in within the business school at Fisher (granted some minimal accounting requirements are met). I really enjoyed my elective courses last quarter and decided that I was up for a challenge with “BUSFIN849: Financial Spreadsheets in Excel” this quarter. However, what I didn’t realize is just how much time I would be spending completing the weekly assignments.
Professor Oglevee is great at setting high expectations and he pushes every student to turn in professional work. Included in that is hours upon hours of compiling spreadsheets, ensuring that all of the formatting is correct (numbers line up, all colors are correct, everything is readable when printed…). While I thought I already had very good Excel skills coming into the class, this course has taught me that there is nearly an endless amount of Excel skills that can be learned. For example, we just got out first introduction to Virtual Basic Editor Today—something I have very little experience with). The models that we create also show just how many different uses there are for Excel.
While it will take a lot of time and a great deal of attention to detail, I feel that this course will be very beneficial for me when starting my professional career.