In 15 years at Microsoft, I knew one guy who was better than me at Excel.
I was a consultant for Microsoft. Excel God was given to me by my Microsoft Customer. I did the analysis of all the bid desk records (non-normalized data) to determine the discount structure for Disti’s and Resellers globally based off of bid desk data that would be a net neutral cost to Microsoft when a Big 4 accounting firm on retainer dropped the ball. I followed up the analytics work with making the presentation to Finance for her where we got final approval to go live.
For myself, I used Solver to create a spreadsheet where I could input 20 variables about a foreclosed property to determine the price I should pay at auction to achieve the returns that I was looking for. On TV, the returns they show are mostly bogus, because there are costs they are not always showing (usually commissions) that would make the deal not profitable. In six years of flipping, I never lost money on a single property. My spreadsheet was usually within +/- $5K of what reality ended up being.