Two months later, her thoughts turned to side hustles as she spitballed ideas on the phone with a friend. “I went inward every single day, doing work on me to make myself a little bit better every day,” says Kat, who grew up with an anxiety disorder that made her avoid attention. She dove into things like meditation, inner child work, and subconscious reprogramming. In March 2020, the pandemic scuttled her work travel and allowed her more freedom to explore her personal interests. Working on herself is a big part of Kat’s storyline. Every single press opportunity, client, business opportunity, everything has just popped into my inbox … It’s really just been about self-mastery.” Lightning bolt vision leads to Miss Excel My whole business has been inbound leads. I put no pressure on myself, and that’s what makes things blow up. “I’ll go a week or two without posting if I don’t feel like it. “The way I look at the world and everything I do, whenever I want to make content, I make content, and it will show up for me,” Kat says, who has almost 800K followers on TikTok. Kat Norton built a spreadsheet training course as a side project.

She became a full-time creator in February 2021. “It was a little side passion project,” she tells The Tilt.īut, thanks to time on her hands at the start of the pandemic, that passion project eventually turned into a content business as she rapidly grew her social media following and created and sold online courses. As part of her MBA program, she had honed her Microsoft Excel skills, so she also built a spreadsheet training course for her co-workers. She worked for a consulting firm, doing things like performing due diligence and borrowing base analyses. Kat’s career started in the most normal ways after graduating from college. “I still can’t believe it,” Kat writes as the video closes. A Forbes contributor had just ranked Kat among the top social media influencers of 2021, capping a seven-figure year for a business that started in her childhood bedroom only a year earlier. “Forbes,” Kat says, crumbling with happiness. A voice in the background asks, “Who just reached out to you?” There’s some mumbling, and the voice says, “Who?” In an Instagram video from New Year’s Eve 2021, Kat Norton – aka Miss Excel – sits at a counter and looks at her laptop, wiping away tears. “Get yourself to a place where trolls on the internet won’t affect you.” “Find a practice that you can do on yourself every single day to make yourself better,” Kat says. Do some inner work: Whether it’s yoga, meditation, or time in nature, do the work to understand yourself.Short lessons are easier for people to digest. Consider microlearning: Don’t create hours-long video covers.It wasn’t perfect, but within a year, she had a seven-figure business. Take messy action: Kat Norton was anxious about being in front of people, but she took the leap to create her first TikTok from her childhood bedroom.Rev Streams: Course sales, corporate training, motivational speaking, occasional sponsored posts After her sixth TikTok, an IT company exec asked her to create courses about G Suite products. Use this to mark the top ten values in blue or the lowest ten in red.Primary Channels: TikTok (793.2K), Instagram (594K), courses Top/Bottom Rules lets you rely on Excel to automatically call out the best or worst values in the set. You can also use this to warn yourself if a field has a certain text string or is a duplicate of another cell. If you want to see any cells that exceed 100, for example, choose Greater Than and enter 100. Highlight Cell Rules flags certain cells that match any criteria you like. Now just choose the item you want to format your data. In the Home tab, click Conditional Formatting.Start by selecting a range of values, such as a column of numbers that represent the most important data on your spreadsheet.In Excel 2010, Microsoft moved it front and center -right into the Home tab - to encourage you to try it out. But did you know that you can get Excel to identify important values - like the top ten numbers in a list, values that are greater than certain threshold, or numbers that are below the average - automatically? It's a feature called Conditional Formatting.Ĭonditional formatting has been around in Excel a long time, but it seems like most people don't know about it or never remember to use it. Manipulating Excel formulas can be challenging, but the payoff (like elegantly formatted tables that identify important stuff like key performance indicators) can be worth it. Unless you were a math whiz in college, you probably have no great love for Excel.

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