小納邁向棕熊之路

（第一次嘗試中英文都寫，兩篇略有不同，沒時間看英文的請直接跳到下面看中文。）

To me, the whole internship is like the World Cup of - not the soccer, but Microsoft Excel.

In business school, or in business environment, the top goal of the job is to “reduce work”. That is, anything that requires the least manual work is highly valued. If you do manual count on the playsets we have, oh gee, you are doomed to be kicked out.

Our finance intern project split up into four small teams, with three interns in each. My team members consist of two Asian girls, including me, and a white guy, and both of them are from the other B-school in the city. Our team goal is to analyze the advertising spending effectiveness of different brands and to recommend optimal budget allocation.

To analyze the problem, one of the first things we had to do was to build up a template that grouped different spending under different brands (it’s actually more detailed but I’ve got too lazy to explain.)

Alright, now here comes the less abstract part. The first task we had was to do COUNT with multiple conditions. Anyone has a little knowledge of Excel would know that if you have one condition, you use “COUNTIF” function to count. But we had multiple conditions. The other girl tried to use Pivot Table (what the hell is that), and the guy tried to use countif (apparently it’s never gonna work, dude.) I asked my all-time best friend, Mr. G, and it told me that all I needed was the “SUMPRODUCT” function. It’s easy, and it’s extremely useful! Bingo! I emailed the others and left the office with satisfaction.

However, thought SUMPRODUCT is amazing, it’s still not good enough to provide us a “dynamic” worksheet (dynamic = a lot of built-in formulas = less manual work). Even if I set up formulas for one brand, I have to change the formula for another brand (at least I have to change the brand name which indicates to a specific tab, and also since the brand codes are in text format instead of numbers, it’s even harder to incorporate those into the formula. Anyway, I should stop here coz it’s getting too techy.)

I got to the office on time the next day to work on the worksheet again. I set up another few formulas, trying to make it more dynamic. By the team meeting at 9, I finished another version and presented it to the team, which still required some manual work.

Nevertheless, the other girl looked at my file and said “check out your email. I just sent out another version to you all.”

The girl opened the file, and there’s a much organized, more formulas built-in spreadsheet.

Then she used a function that I didn’t know before, and will definitely remember for the rest of my life: CTRL+H, a function that can save you at least 20 seconds at work. She also switched the text format of the original file into numbers, which made the formula I didn’t figure out earlier worked, and used some IF functions (I didn’t do a good job describing the situation here, but all in all, I was stunned when she showed us the file.) There were still minor flaws in the file but it totally beat all the other versions.

That’s it. I moved my file to the trash can and feel like the French on Sunday. What can I say? It’s a business world for experts in Excel.

整個暑期實習對我來說就像場世界盃一樣—只是比的不是足球，而是Microsoft Excel。

在商學院、或者職場，工作的最高目標就是「減輕工作」，也就是要將花費在人工的時間上降到最低（自動化），所以如果你還用原始的方式一個一個計算產品數量的話，應該很快就會被職場淘汰吧！

我們的暑期財務實習生計劃共分成四個小隊、每小隊三個人，我的隊裡有包含我共兩個亞洲女生、一個白人男生，他們兩個都是在這裡另一所知名商學院唸書的。我們這個小隊的目標是要評估公司各個品牌現行廣告費用的有效性以及建議如何做廣告預算最適分配。

我們評估這個問題的第一步是要將各種不同廣告費用依費用大小做分類，太詳細的細節我太懶了就跳過不說。

簡單來說，我們要做的第一件事就是使用Excel裡面的Count函數，任何對Excel有點基本常識的人都知道可以用Countif來做任何只有單一條件的計算，但是我們必須在有多項條件下進行計算（依照金額、主品牌、副品牌、費用細項分類等等），另外那個亞洲女生用了個我一輩子都沒聽過的高級Pivot Table（這什麼鬼東西），白人男生則是用了我剛已經說過不可能適用的Countif函數（裝肖維），我呢，則是問了我忠心的好友G先生，得到了使用Sumproduct函數來解決問題的答案，更重要的是這個函數使用起來既簡單又直接解決我的問題，我很高興地把我的發現做成檔案，email給大家後就回家了。

雖然Sumproduct很好用，但仍然不敷所需，因為我們需要的是一個功能超強大的工作底稿，而我現有的東西在複製貼上到另一個品牌的工作底稿時仍需要手動去改公式裡的品牌名稱，也就是需要很多手工作業。

第二天我準時到辦公室，繼續改進我的工作底稿，早上九點開會的時候我將我最新的成果弄給大家看，新的檔案改進許多但仍需要一些手工作業。

但另外那個亞洲女生聽完只跟我說：「打開你的email，我剛有寄另一個檔案給你們。」

接著她展示她的最新底稿給大家看—一個看起來非常地有條理、重點是有非常多繁雜的公式的超強大工作底稿。

特別是她用了一個我從來沒學過、卻一輩子可能也會忘不了的Excel功能：Ctrl+H（一個可以讓你在工作上至少省下二十秒的高級快速功能），她還更改多張底稿的格式、解決了我之前在設立公式上遇到的問題，並多加了一些其他公式在底稿裡頭，我在聽她講的時候只能用目瞪口呆來形容，她的底稿仍有一些小問題但是比我們其他兩人的底稿都好多了！

會議後我把我的底稿移到桌面上的垃圾桶，感覺自己像是上個星期天的法國人一樣，那有什麼辦法呢？這個職場根本就是Excel專家的天下。