Excel Skills Vital to a Successful Workday® Implementation

During a Workday® implementation and stabilization period, Excel skills are a must. Train as many people as possible on your team (especially techno-functional users) to have advanced Excel skills.

Here's why:

Reason #1

While it's easy to export report data to Excel, it's not so easy to validate your data with your legacy data to compare 100% of the data converted. Sure, you can eye-ball the results and make a guesstimate that nearly all the data is good enough, but in the world of reporting "good enough" will haunt you (and your students) later.

Use Excel to focus on outcomes fields that combine data plus configuration. For example, in Workday® Student, GPA is a great outcome validation. If your data and configuration are correct, the GPA will be calculated accurately. Excel has excellent built-in tools and formulas that allow you to do this, such as VLOOKUP or XLOOKUP.

Reason #2

Workday® loves to give you the option to export configuration items to Excel such as business processes. Log into Workday® and look in the top right-hand corner for the little Excel icon. This is especially helpful when you're validating a tenant build. You can export the configuration from your source tenant and target tenant to ensure they match (minus anything you wanted changed).

The more comfortable and skilled you become in Excel, the more you can utilize the Excel export feature saving yourself time and optimizing your tenant.

Reason #3

You can use Excel to validate reports. I recommend validating all reports by building them on two different data sources. You will find that one is usually better (e.g. contains the most recent grade versus all grades ever submitted). This is also a great way to compare reports and ensure you aren't missing any data. I can't tell you how many times I've found issues during my validation that were critical to me having an accurate report.

Reason #4

In the first year after go-live, you may need to get data by blending two reports on different data sources. This can be easily accomplished in Excel (or another tool like Tableau or PowerBI).

You want to avoid building a data warehouse or Prism without understanding your data model (which takes time). Use outside tools like Excel to get a handle on your data.

Gain Advanced Excel Skills:

There are so many available free resources to develop Excel skills. I couldn't even start listing them here (that's another post for the future!). Simply start on youtube or take a free course online. As a personal recommendation, I follow @excel.withgrant on Instagram. I've learned so much from him. Here's a link to his YouTube channel: https://lnkd.in/gZYXke-g