HeyJaredStanleyWangg's Substack
Weekly letters for self-taught data analysts, from a senior data analyst with no degree. Roadmap: stanleywangg.com
- Indexed issues, last 90 days
- 11
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- Sep 29, 2026
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- Jul 6, 2026
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The Analysts Getting Hired Still Do One Thing in Excel That AI Can’t Do for Them (opens the original)
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Dear friends,Every week there is a new tool you are told to learn.A new AI agent. Claude Code. Python. Another dashboard tool.So you open Excel and it feels like the old thing. The boring thing.And you think, why am I still learning spreadsheets when AI can do this for me?Someone asked me exactly that on Threads a few days ago. Two words.“Why excel?”Here is my honest answer.why Excel still comes firstExcel is the bread and butter of corporate jobs.Nobody expects you to be a master of it. But if
The People Moving Fastest Stopped Learning Excel Before They Felt Ready (opens the original)
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Dear friends,You are four months in. You know SUM. You know IF. You know XLOOKUP.And you are still doing Excel tutorials.Not because you need them. Because nobody has ever told you when you are allowed to stop.So you keep going, since another Excel video feels safer than one bad night of SQL.The people moving faster than you are not smarter than you. They had two things you were never given. An order, and an ending for each stage.Here is both.the six stagesThis is the whole path. Not a curriculu
The Analysts Getting Hired Do Not Start by Analysing (opens the original)
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Dear friends,You have been taught that analysis starts with a formula.It does not. It starts with a file you cannot trust yet.Every messy export lands the same way. Someone typed a region name with a space in front of it. Someone pasted the same order in twice. Half the names are shouted and half are whispered. Some of it is hard to see. All of it can change your answer.So you build the beautiful formula on top of a broken file, and the number comes out clean and confident and wrong.Tonight you
The People Who Learn Excel Fast Only Do One Thing a Day (opens the original)
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Dear friends,Most people do not fail at Excel.They fail at the first week of Excel.They open a course with ninety lessons, do four, and never come back. Then they decide they are bad at this.You are not bad at this. You were handed forty things when you needed seven.So here is the whole first week. One named thing a day. Each day has a test, so you know you actually did it and are not just watching someone else do it.build the table onceYou need one table for the entire week. Type it once and le
The Analysts Getting Hired Are Not Learning What You Are Learning (opens the original)
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Dear friends,There is one question I get asked more than any other. On almost every post, in almost the same words.Is Python really necessary?I want to answer it properly, once, so you can stop asking it and start.Let’s be brutally honest.No. Not for your first job. And learning it first is the single most common reason the people who write to me have not started.why am I still stuck on the first stepHere is what I think happens, because it happened to me.You decide to become a data analyst. You
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