1. Automating tasks
How to develop these abilities
First you will learn some keyboard shortcuts for regular functions. Copy, cut & paste you might already know by now! There are also basic formatting shortcuts, many of which also exist in "Markdown" formatting. As you master touch-typing and these keyboard shortcuts, you will combine the skills naturally and suddenly you'll find yourself capable of doing some tasks very quickly, especially if you do them often or in a repeating sequence!
Questions about your task
It is also worth taking a few moments or minutes to consider the task ahead of you.
Does it contain repetition?
Can you break it into repeatable sequences?
Will those sequences be too long or too complex to repeat accurately?
What other ways can I achieve the same result?
Is it better to do one item in full, then repeat the process for the next item; or is it better to operate like a factory production line, repeating one task on every item, then repeating the next task on every item, until all are complete?
If you are interrupted for any reason, will you be able to remember where you had reached, and where & how to resume later?
Is my method scalable?
These are the kinds of questions I think about before starting a larger task, such as sanitizing and refactoring datasets in Excel. Often, such datasets are large and apparently meaningless, so getting lost & confused is easily done.
Learn the shortcuts, plan the repetative sequences, consolidate them into muscle memory.
Scalable methods
“Is my method scalable?”
In your current task, perhaps scalability is unnecessary, but by thinking about this and by practising creating & using methods that are scalable, you will be able to scale more easily in future tasks.
You will feel more capable, you will feel less daunted by the prospect of larger tasks and larger projects, and you'll feel more confident to take on those tasks when you encounter them.
Before you even know it, you'll be tackling large & cumbersome things, such as datasets, which are important for managing a business's inventory.
When you are presented with a giant database stored in a spreadsheet, how does it make you feel?
Think about how each column contains uniform types of data. How there is a pattern in each data type. How you can transform the contents of each column using spreadsheet math functions and text functions. You can learn just a few simple spreadsheet functions and then you'll be able to manipulate large datasets, clean them up, re-order them, check for mistakes and outliers, and more!
I couldn't do any of these things until I decided to try. And in the process of trying, I learnt a tonne of information from guidance online — youtube videos, office software tutorial websites, discussions on reddit and forums. There is all the information you could ever want, freely available if you just try to find it.
Actual automation
There are also actual automation solutions available — after all, this is a computer!
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