Tik Tok star Miss Excel explains the fundamentals of teaching tech to laymen

Kat Nor­ton wants to shake up the way we feel about learn­ing. Bet­ter known to her audi­ences on Tik­Tok and Insta­gram by her user name, Miss Excel, Nor­ton has been adding her dis­tinc­tive brand of youth­ful exu­ber­ance to Microsoft’s ven­er­a­ble spread­sheet pro­gram since she start­ed post­ing usage tips on the video-shar­ing net­works in June 2020. Short videos such as Scrub Data, Time Trick and Heat Map Mag­ic, set to pop­u­lar R&B tunes and accom­pa­nied by a beam­ing Nor­ton danc­ing to the beat, have helped her to attract well over 1.3 mil­lion fol­low­ers to date.

This prod­uct of a pan­dem­ic lock­down has turned into a suc­cess­ful enter­prise for the 27-year-old Long Islander, pro­vid­ing the spring­board for her online acad­e­my, which she opened in Novem­ber 2020. This offers video-based learn­ing for busi­ness­es and indi­vid­u­als who want to improve their under­stand­ing of Microsoft pack­ages and select­ed Google appli­ca­tions too. More than 10,000 peo­ple have enrolled so far on cours­es rang­ing from Word with Miss Excel, priced at $297 (£220), to Com­plete Microsoft Office Suite at $997. 

The idea for Miss Excel sprang from Norton’s gen­uine pas­sion for the pro­gram. Hav­ing start­ed using it as a pri­ma­ry school pupil, she began to get “real­ly good” at Excel while study­ing for her MBA at Bing­ham­ton Uni­ver­si­ty in upstate New York. She was then able to “put the dots togeth­er” while con­duct­ing secu­ri­ti­sa­tion reviews for banks as an employ­ee of Cal­i­for­nia-based glob­al con­sul­tan­cy Pro­tiv­i­ti. 

“I used spread­sheets dai­ly in my work and would con­stant­ly be com­bin­ing tricks in inno­v­a­tive ways to solve prob­lems in my capac­i­ty as the company’s Excel ‘sub­ject-mat­ter expert’,” Nor­ton recalls. “As a pas­sion project, I devel­oped an inter­nal train­ing pro­gramme. I went on to spend years host­ing Excel cours­es around the US.”

With the nation­al Covid lock­down putting paid to her work trav­el plans, Nor­ton sud­den­ly had more time on her hands. She realised that the pow­er of social media could enable her to help so many more peo­ple feel “more com­fort­able and empow­ered” in their use of the soft­ware.

There’s a sim­ple prin­ci­ple under­pin­ning Norton’s way of teach­ing a top­ic that’s wide­ly viewed as dif­fi­cult and dull: make it mem­o­rable. 

When Nor­ton describes her cours­es as “so suc­cess­ful”, she’s not exag­ger­at­ing. Since she uploaded her first video to Tik­Tok (in which she show­cased Excel’s left/right func­tion while danc­ing to Drake’s Toosie Slide), Miss Excel has become a sev­en-fig­ure busi­ness. Sales of her B2C cours­es alone have gen­er­at­ed more than $1m.

While female white-col­lar work­ers aged under 35 com­prise the biggest cus­tomer base for Norton’s cours­es, she firm­ly believes that any­body, regard­less of demo­graph­ic, can get the most from this sort of mate­r­i­al as long as they’re open to it and con­fi­dent enough in their abil­i­ty to pick up new tech skills. 

“With the right type of teach­ing, any­one can learn any­thing,” she says. “But self-belief from the learn­er is crit­i­cal. It’s why I work hard to empow­er my stu­dents and keep them engaged.”

Nor­ton believes that cre­ativ­i­ty is cru­cial for any CIO seek­ing ways to inform col­leagues in oth­er func­tions about impor­tant tech-relat­ed mat­ters that may seem arcane and/or arid. The dan­gers of phish­ing, say, can be made more fath­omable if they’re con­veyed in a way that extends beyond the stan­dard com­pa­ny-wide warn­ing email, which is like­ly to be delet­ed and for­got­ten quick­ly by many recip­i­ents. You needn’t start throw­ing shapes on MS Teams (unless you want to, of course), but your mes­sage will have far more impact if you can make it an engag­ing learn­ing expe­ri­ence that your tar­get audi­ence can relate to. 

Whether you’re try­ing to school your CEO on ran­somware or edu­cate the wider busi­ness on the mer­its of Trel­lo, con­sid­er before­hand what approach is like­ly to res­onate with the recip­i­ents. How did you orig­i­nal­ly learn about the top­ic? What, if any­thing, would you change about that expe­ri­ence to make it more appro­pri­ate for an audi­ence of non-experts?

While cre­at­ing a sense of ener­gy and excite­ment around top­ics will make them instant­ly more appeal­ing, keep­ing things sim­ple and to the point will also help. So-called micro-learn­ing is anoth­er increas­ing­ly pop­u­lar approach that CIOs should look to tap into, accord­ing to Nor­ton. Bite-sized train­ing ses­sions – as opposed to, say, a three-hour marathon on a Fri­day after­noon – allow for height­ened focus and bet­ter knowl­edge reten­tion. 

“If your class­es are too long, they’ll tend to drag. Peo­ple will zone out,” she warns. 

From a teacher’s per­spec­tive, Nor­ton rec­om­mends analysing all the mate­r­i­al you want to share and work­ing out how it can be split into chunks, before “infus­ing each piece with as much cre­ativ­i­ty and fun as pos­si­ble”. This approach enables big­ger top­ics to be bro­ken down into more digestible sub-top­ics, with each matched to a cre­ative idea.

Remem­ber that your col­leagues are only human – which means that mak­ing a con­nec­tion with them is essen­tial, she stress­es. 

“In all of my cours­es, you will always see me on the screen,” Nor­ton says. “It’s as if you and I are hav­ing a con­ver­sa­tion, one on one.”