What’s your level? Six levels of spreadsheet sophistication

This article has also been published on the GRID Blog.

In preparing everything from the product features and UI to the go-to-market plan and messaging for GRID, we have realized that it will be helpful to look at users’ spreadsheet knowledge by levels of sophistication.

Through conversations with spreadsheet users, expert consultants and through deep analysis of a corpus of more than 100 thousand spreadsheets (more on that later) we have come to the following conclusion.

We’d be interested to hear if these levels make sense to you and which level you believe you belong to:

• Spreadsheet consumerHas Excel installed (or has logged on to Google Sheets)Opens and views files provided by others
• Spreadsheet basic userCreates new Excel files (or Google Sheets documents)Enters data and basic formulas +, -, *, /, SUM(), AVERAGE(), ROUND()
• Spreadsheet intermediate userUses more sophisticated functions such as IF(), FIND(), NOW(), SUBTOTAL(), …Uses - but does not create - pivot tablesMay name cells and ranges
• Spreadsheet proUses VLOOKUP() (and soon thereafter INDEX(MATCH()) )Creates pivot tablesMay use Data Tables
• Spreadsheet developerHas the Developer tab turned onCreates forms (Excel) or uses Google FormsRecords macros
• Spreadsheet scripterWrites VBA code (Excel) or Apps Scripts (Google)Uses PowerQuery and PowerPivot