As a software developer (leaving junior position, now taking mid-level), how important are Microsoft Excel skills?
I ask as I have done this extensively in one job but is it reall a skill that will help in future jobs? Also, is this sort of skill of knowing how to present information to high up management really useful in software development?
Thanks
This question is fairly specific to the industry in which you're working. They're nearly useless if you're developing (most) web apps, OS kernels, machine learning algorithms or games. They're nearly indispensable if you're developing Excel-based workflows for the accounting department or some such. Consider what sort of work you want to be doing, or are likely to be required to do at your new job.
Knowing office suites are good skills to have. Knowing excel is as important as knowing word (you do write documentation, right? right?).
In many businesses you will end up migrating to/from excel, writing applications that export to excel and in general figure out the macro-filled worksheets that came from finance/hr/other department.
So, yes it is important when working in a business that is using MS Office.
Wouldn't you consider editing a spreadsheet a pretty basic computer skill? I would view this as mutually exclusive from your actual software development skills.
To put this another way, if a company was interviewing someone for a "senior developer" position and didn't offer the position to an otherwise excellent candidate because he/she wasn't very "good" with Excel, I would conclude that this company was insane.
edit: let me put this a second way. When interviewing for software development jobs, I've never had an employer ask me how well I know Excel. When interviewing candidates for software development jobs, I've never asked or cared how well they know Excel.
Unless you are working specifically with an Excel project or are porting some bizarre Excel application to the web, Excel skills are relatively useless. When hiring I always ignore the "skilled with MS Office" part of the resume. Junior and intermediate programmers are mostly coding any office tools they are using involve filling in preset templates, design documents for instance, that don't require a lot of knowledge.
Once you hit senior dev, team lead or management you'll use some kind of spreadsheet, most likely Excel, for budgets, proposals, salary charts, SR&ED applications to supply all sorts of data to the other parts of your organization.
short answer: No. they are not important skills, and they will not help you get a job as developer.
long answer: Generally a halfway sane company expect their developer to learn to work with new things, because they can not expect anyone to know everything. So whether you do or do not know your way around Excel is not an issue. It is far more important that you know how to program neatly, and pick up new skills all the time.
On the other hand there probably are some businesses that specifically work a lot with Excel. In interviews with those companies you'll have a slight advantage over the other applicants. But they will probably just as easily choose someone else because they can always teach somebody the ins and outs of Excel.
Note: I hope you define skills with Excel as developing with or for Excel, not using a spreadsheet.
Between the lines I see the question:
Should I add "MS Excel - advanced skills" record to my CV?
My answer is "no", it looks pretty funny.
Having Excel listed on your CV is pointless in my opinion, for a programmer/software developer at least.
However I do beleive some knowledge of a spreadsheet application is an advantage. A few times I've created a mock up or prototype within a spreadsheet application to test some complex mathematics. In turn this allows me to ensure my test code and production code is spot on.