As part of our new series Office Insider Spotlight, we will be introducing you to MVPs, creators, and tech leaders who love the Office Insider program. Office Insiders, meet Mynda Treacy!
Mynda Treacy
She’s a Microsoft MVP and the Co-Founder of My Online Training Hub. Mynda Treacy won the Microsoft Excel MVP award in 2014 for her outstanding contributions to the community. As a qualified accountant, Treacy has been working with Excel since 1995 and sharing her knowledge on her blog since 2010.
She teaches several highly-acclaimed courses, including an Excel Dashboard Course and an Excel Expert course. Her classes are succinct because Treacy wants to get users up to speed quickly so they can start implementing what they’ve learned right away. She draws on her vast, multi-national experience to provide real business scenarios.
We recently caught up with Treacy to discuss her tech career and what she thinks of the Office Insider program.
Tell us about why you love the Office Insider program.
Everyone likes something new and shiny, and for an Excel fan, there’s not much more exciting than getting to try out a new feature the day it’s released. Particularly when it’s a feature, you may have had a say in shaping or suggesting through your involvement in the Microsoft MVP program.
What is something you’ve created because of the Officer Insider program?
I was excited when the new LET function came out and was lucky enough to be in the first 50% of Office Insider users who got the function in its early days, so I put together a comprehensive guide to the Excel LET function on my YouTube channel. LET is a dead easy function to learn, and it improves the readability and performance of your formulas. Everyone should use it.
The Visio team asked MVPs to promote their new Visio Data Visualizer add-in for Excel that allows you to create Flowcharts linked to cells. It’s super cool to have Visio functionality inside of Excel, so of course, I agreed.
And coming from a banking background, I was keen to try out the new STOCKHISTORY function. The way it integrates with Data Types makes for some formidable tools all inside of Excel.
Tell us about your journey in tech.
My first experience of spreadsheets was with Lotus 1-2-3, but it was only a few months later that my employer switched to Excel. When a colleague taught me how to use VLOOKUP, I was hooked.
I spent 8 years in London working as a global IT financial controller for two investment banks in London. As a management accountant, I lived and breathed budgeting and reporting in Excel.
I later moved to a coastal town in Australia and worked with small businesses where I found I was spending a lot of time teaching people how to use Excel instead of doing my real work. The skill level in small companies was surprisingly low, and I was inspired to help them improve. I knew with the power of the internet that I could reach more people, so along with my husband, we started My Online Training Hub.
Each week we share Excel tutorials on our blog and newsletter, which goes out to 200k+ people. I also provide online training in Excel, Dashboards, Power Query, Power Pivot, and Power BI, and we run an Excel support forum.
What is one word that best describes how you work?
Self-motivated. Working for yourself and from home requires a lot of focus and motivation because the distractions are endless.
What movies or books or other forms of art inspire you the most?
My fellow Excel MVPs inspire me. I am fortunate to call some of the best Excel minds in the world my friends. The daily email exchanges amongst Excel MVPs contain a constant source of inspiration.
Which superhero character do you connect with in real life?
Elastigirl from The Incredibles. She is a mum first, and as a superhero, she’s not deterred by working in a predominantly male profession.