Excel Heroes: Alejandra Horvath

After becoming part of the global Excel community, Sheetcast made some wonderful new friends from around the world. We were delighted to discover that one of them lives a stone’s throw from us, right here in our hometown of Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. Perhaps, with Alejandra’s love of Excel, she will soon become a Sheetcast expert too!‍

Emerging Excel guru Alejandra Horvath earned her Excel stripes honestly. Horvath has worked in accounting for over 20 years, and has been immersed in Excel the whole time. 

Well, almost. “When I first started, I was working with Lotus 123,” Horvath laughs. “I remember I didn't like Excel when it first came out, because I had to use the mouse—and with Lotus we didn't use the mouse.”

Fortunately, Horvath overcame her initial qualms and went on to become a dedicated Excel fan. Then one day, when a video popped up on her LinkedIn feed, her Excel universe expanded exponentially.

“Two years ago, I started seeing videos from Celia Alves. I realized there is a world of knowledge out there, with Excel and many other topics, that people share—just because, right? It was like, oh wow, I couldn't believe it.”

Horvath soon added Wyn Hopkins to her list of favorite Excel experts. “So, with Celia and Wyn, that's how I started learning Power Query. I just watched their videos and they're like, wow, so amazing.” She ravenously consumed Power Query videos from other online gurus and took Ben Gribaudo’s Power Query course (“Mastering M”). Eventually, she herself became a Microsoft-certified Excel Expert. “And now here I am. I'm teaching Power Query!”

She found herself inundating acquaintances with her sudden wealth of new knowledge. “Whatever I was learning, I was texting my friends—did you know you could do this with Excel? Did you know you could do that?” she recalls. “They got tired of it.

“But I needed to tell someone, because this is so cool. So, that’s when I opened my YouTube channel. And that was the starting point.”

Before long, Horvath found herself operating two Excel YouTube channels—one in English, one in Spanish—focused mostly on Power Query. At times, she hosted multiple live events on YouTube each week—often lasting two hours or longer. Gradually, she has started setting limits; she’s down to “only” a one-hour Spanish-language live stream on Tuesdays, and a 30-minute English live stream on Saturdays.

As Horvath interacted with her growing community, a pattern emerged. “I started noticing the women talent,” she says. “I come from a culture where it is a little bit harder to be seen as a professional if you are a woman. Even here, sometimes it takes more for women to show our capabilities, but in Latin America it’s even harder.”

So, she added a podcast to her growing list of social media duties. “I started inviting women to share their experiences, their challenges, and their strategies to overcome those challenges.”

With two YouTube channels and nearly 7,000 subscribers, Horvath eventually found herself fending off requests for her services. “People would message me. Can you do a consultation? Can you do a class? But I had my full-time job.”

And so, Horvath took a leap of faith. When her accounting contract ended on April 28, she decided leave full-time employment behind and go into business for herself. “I’m in that transition. I'm starting my own classes and consulting. Right now I'm preparing some of the classes that I want to upload to my website and probably Udemy so I can start getting some clients from there as well. And of course, consulting could be a good opportunity for me because I have experience with so many companies.”

Of course, going freelance is not like flicking a switch. “There are a lot of things that you have to deal with in order to start operating as a business. It has been quite a bit of change. I have been an employee for way too long.”

Despite the ever-expanding workload, Horvath finds time to maintain a wide vibrant social media presence on LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter—and even TikTok. 

Really? Excel on TikTok? “There are so many good Excel people on TikTok,” Horvath insists. “This one woman, exceldictionary, has two or three million followers. There’s another guy, excel.friend—same thing, two or three million followers. And there’s excel.withgrant; he’s at 700,000, so he is scaling really fast.”

Like any good teacher, Horvath continues to be an avid learner. She positively raves about a recent TikTok from Wyn Hopkins, in which he shows that you can now create implicit measures when you build a pivot table in Excel, getting data from Power BI. She’s equally excited about Dynamic Array (“Oh my God, it's just fantastic!”) and the emergence of copilot and AI within Excel. 

In short, after more than two decades Horvath’s Excel enthusiasm is still going strong. “I’m excited to see how much more power we’re going to gain in Excel, with all these developments.”

This post was written by Sheetcast, the official brand partner of the Global Excel Summit.