Who I'm Reading Today

I've recently begun reading Patrick Carey's New Perspectives: Microsoft Office 365 & Excel 2019 Comprehensive, 1st ed. (2020). It's solid, in lieu of the documentation that Microsoft no longer produces itself, if one needs such materials. There's a newer version; this is one of the two versions required by a summer class.

So far, it's kind of soothing: not soporific but reassuring for someone self-taught who hasn't used Excel much since its 2007 release, the last to have a jam-packed toolbar of doom. Like, so far, sometimes I remember keyboard shortcuts or exact command-names for things I can't find on the ribbon, which ... means I should learn the ribbon.

Why am I taking a class on using Excel?

1) The fun-fact answer: though I've figured out how to use Excel to clean and transform medium-sized chunks of data (structured text measured in megabytes, not a few dozen rows), I'm ignorant of a bunch of normal things that people use it for. Also, tables tend to make me glaze over, and I intend to narrow down the issue and patch it. At least they don't give me actual headaches, as the graphs in my recent econ assignments did.

2) The other answer: about two years ago, I began pondering what would benefit me for job-seeking, once my health had rebuilt itself further. Last year I decided with my physician that I could probably handle taking a class or two, and then something else pushed me into going faster. Like econ, Excel contributes to a category requirement.

Meanwhile, my two-year-ago plan for job-seeking options has been pretty comprehensively eaten by what people think AI can do---not necessarily what it can do well, but what they wish it could handle for them. By the time I wrap my course-taking next spring, I'll have learned some things about basic accounting---because I want to---and I'll understand better what I can offer, may tolerate, and would probably dislike in the current job landscape.

FAQ: no, I'm not pursuing a CPA license or a data-analyst certification. It wouldn't make financial sense at my age, and most people wouldn't believe in it. I've done enough things already that're hard to believe yet well documented! A thing one cannot really say to a recruiter or hiring manager: in 30ish years of past employment, I've achieved enough. Anyway, I intend the next stage to be less pressureful.