Alan Jarvis

Over 165,000 Happy Students, in 200 Countries Are Enrolled In My Courses...

Hi, my name is Alan, and I have almost thirty years of experience in teaching various subjects and have held senior management positions at several blue chip and Times Top 100 companies. I now specialise in consultancy, interim work and teaching here on Udemy.

My love for Excel began soon after the program was released. Back then, we really only used it for typing tables in our production planning department. If you can believe it, I was taught to then calculate with a calculator and TYPE the answers into Excel...you'd be surprised how many people I meet who still do this.

There were two turning points for me in my journey. The first was a chance conversation with one of our accountants when I was complaining how slow it was to keep having to flip between worksheets to see different bits of data. He introduced me to VLookups and a new world of possibilities opened up for me...

...I found that I need never have huge paper accountancy pads (remember those?) and a calculator to produce a production plan again! Suddenly, I could produce my plan in 15 minutes, rather than the day and a half it used to take. I began delving into other features of Excel, and finding ways to incorporate them into the planning "system" I had created, and remember this was back in the day when the internet hadn't been invented :)

Through trial and error, I refined my Workbook until I could chomp through days of work in seconds, and what's more, using these powerful features of Excel, I could optimise our production runs to get more output from the same working week, something that had never been done before. Promotion soon followed, and I became the "go to guy" for anything Excel related. That was the 90's.

Then, in manufacturing, came the MRP revolution. We had an army of programmers developing a system for us. This was my second turning point. I was awestruck with coders. The skill they had, and how clever they were, and that they were smart enough to go to university in the first place. I wasn't like that. I had no formal education beyond primary and secondary school, but a really cool programmer named Mark let me into a secret...

He said "If you can describe, step by step, how to cross the road without getting killed, you can be a programmer". I recorded my first macro, and took a peek under the hood. I deconstructed the VBA code, and played with it until I understood what everything did. Then I changed it to make it do what I needed it to do.

Since then, I have developed accountancy systems, simple planning systems, full blown MRP systems and scores of stand alone "helper" systems to simplify and speed up work in almost every department in every company I have ever worked in. Some of the solutions I created 20 years ago are still being used today.

If you doubt the power of Excel, it may surprise you to learn that you can run the procurement and material control of a £1.3b (yes, billion) company with an Excel file with a bit of coding behind it. This is a skill that people will pay highly for.

Not everyone wants to go that far, so over the years I have taught people to create efficient solutions for themselves, either with or without coding. Those who took the time to learn have since had multiple promotions, or have started their own businesses! At the very least, they are getting more work done in less time with less headaches :)

If you are a complete beginner, just want to polish up your skills, or want to create sophisticated super efficient solutions for your business or personal life, my series of courses will help you achieve that. All you need is a little time, and a willingness to learn...I'm looking forward to working with you.

Alan