How did you (advanced users) become so good in excel?

This describes my Excel history...

https://www.excelforum.com/showthread.php?p=3432911

Like many here I cut my teeth on Viscalc back in the heady days of 1979 and the Apple II.
Even then with its very limited functionality (as seen from 2015) it was obvious that the whole concept of an electronic columnar ruled virtual piece of paper was destined to change the world of industry and commerce.

Other products came along which I used with varying levels of success, Multiplan, SuperCalc, Symphony, Lotus 123, Lotus Improv until finally MS released the basic Excel and finally added the VBA functionality. Lotus 123 was the bees knees at the time and I spent lot of time experimenting with that in conjunction with dBase and the company I was with invested heavily in 123. Sadly Lotus lost their way and were eventually blown away by Excel.

Spend time here looking at questions and answers and you'll absorb a lot. Not only things that Excel can do but also best practices for putting it into use and when it's best to use standard Excel functionality and when it's best to use the VBA procedures/macros.

....and 36 years later I'm still learning!

Happy developing...

I started out (28? years ago) on a course that used lotus 123 as part of 1 of the subjects. Learning 123 was not part of the class, but it was used in a financial model. I thought this was cool, not having been exposed to a computor before, let alone having seen a spread sheet. I got hooked and bought a brand new Commador PC10 and started playing around with 123. A few years later I intro'd a PC to my boss in an Industrial Engineering department and migrated up to Supercalc and then to Quattro Pro.

Years later, I bit the bullet and converted to excel. I thought I knew what I was doing with excel, and thought I was good at it - until I joined this community and saw what "good" really looked like. I participated here, and slowly learned more and more, and now (again) consider myself to be "good", but there are many here who are "great"

Self-taught, and practice regularly here...helping others give you exposure to different aspects of the program, and opens up new skills all the time

I started with Lotus 1-2-3 in 1981 working in an audit department for a fortune 50 company. I progressed along in that company for 15 years in various financial roles that required budgeting, forecasting and analysis. Eventually moving over to Excel. I am primarily self taught. Moved onto learning Access about eight years ago when a client (doing consulting work) asked for a database. Participating in these forums as a questioner then a answerer has helped to develop the skills I have today.

When I started it was, in a sense, much easier. With the application you got a book (or books) which described all the features and functions that the programme had. So you could start at the beginning and work through until you had got all sections ticked off as "I have used that". Eventually you could say: "I know it all".
Although my knowledge has grown as Excel has grown I no longer know it all. I don't even know how to enumerate all the parts to determine how much I know. But I carry on learning.

....helping people right here on the forum. Having a non-stop palette of real-world problems to solve and the willingness to spend the time to help means endless opportunities to push and learn.

Most of the other responders on this thread have been working on spreadsheets since before I was born, but my experience has been pretty much the same as everyone else.

I won't say I'm self-taught; probably 10% of my excel knowledge came from formal education (mostly on the margins, how to use excel to get to where the teacher wanted the lab report to look like or whatever), and of the remaining 90%, it wasn't self-taught or even self-guided, all I was doing was simply figuring out why and how forum answers worked. Sometimes that was as simple as reading the definition of every function that was used, but there have been plenty of great blog posts dissecting how exactly some novel construction worked.

My path was more like, I came to the forum with Baby's First Question, and after that, I started to find that every question I had, had already been answered before, as long as I could generalize what I needed, and often with about three completely different strategies of attack.

I learned the most from writing tutorials/web pages; see e.g. http://www.snb-vba.eu/inhoud_en.html
If you try to explain something to someone else it becomes very clear what knowledge you are missing.

Started out programming 40 odd years ago and worked in IT support, customer service and management all my working life. Dabbled with 123 a little, played with IMPROV when it came out and spent quite a bit of time using the spreadsheet part of Microsoft Works. Started using Excel maybe 20 years ago and went on a one or two day VBA course that introduced me to the principles of automating Excel. Then I started looking for projects where I could develop my skills and benefit others. The first was to automate the production of sickness MI for the HR team. It reduced something like 10-12 man days effort to just a few hours. I was hooked. Knowing what I know now, I suspect that it could have been even quicker

In those days, I asked lots of questions on forums like this and bought LOTS of books by people like John Walkenbach and Steven Bullen. Eventually, took tentative steps towards answering questions on various forums. Tend to focus on this forum, partly because it's one of the few that permits uploading of files ... which makes it a lot easier to understand the issue(s). And of course, the community here

Regards, TMS