There's some videos of high level skills if you search "excel modeling championship". Shkreli was a hedge fund/wall street guy if I remember correctly and probably has more of a banking background. That area of finance tends to be hyper competitive on Excel skills. I've heard stories of them banning mice from the office to force people to use keyboard shortcuts and what not. It's locker room braggadocious badge of honor in that world. But it's the type of application navigation that it sounds like you're describing.
I on the other hand am in realm of corporate finance. Think CFOs, Controllers, and their teams. It's a bit more relaxed here but you still need enough skill to get the job done effectively. We don't really care how you get the job done (use a mouse, keyboard, google, it's all game) but you need a nice output and your approach in an interview context should convince me that you'd be capable of solving similar problems in the future. For that reason, I typically provide crappy raw data (oddly and inconsistently formatted) and ask them to build or analyze it. Given some fictional general ledger data; can they build a 3 statement model? Can they summarize some payroll data in a logical way? Build a budget scenario based on the following actual financial data... also, here are 5 basic features the model should incorporate. I don't typically watch them so I don't know how they navigate the application (I don't find it important) but we give a time limit and stop them at time and review work attempted. The highest skilled folks tend to finish within time.
It's counter-intuitive but the worst thing for an analyst is to work at a company that has a great ERP/BI tools with reliable data, etc. It's only about 10% of companies that have their shit together in that regard and those analyst just run reports from XYZ GUI and never have to work with data. So they have low level of Excel skills but think they are great analysts. I've never actually experienced that world, but I know their analysts wouldn't cut it in the real world of crappy data and ad-hoc work. I've seen them crash and burn too many times and it's painful for the entire team.
Back to your original point, as you might expect, most folks that are great at Excel just use it a lot to build complex things. They may have learned the keyboard shortcuts along the way; or not. It just takes practice and muscle memory will kick in but also requires regular practice to keep sharp at it. There's also some pretty decent tooling to help you step your game up if you wish. I personally like https://macabacus.com/
I on the other hand am in realm of corporate finance. Think CFOs, Controllers, and their teams. It's a bit more relaxed here but you still need enough skill to get the job done effectively. We don't really care how you get the job done (use a mouse, keyboard, google, it's all game) but you need a nice output and your approach in an interview context should convince me that you'd be capable of solving similar problems in the future. For that reason, I typically provide crappy raw data (oddly and inconsistently formatted) and ask them to build or analyze it. Given some fictional general ledger data; can they build a 3 statement model? Can they summarize some payroll data in a logical way? Build a budget scenario based on the following actual financial data... also, here are 5 basic features the model should incorporate. I don't typically watch them so I don't know how they navigate the application (I don't find it important) but we give a time limit and stop them at time and review work attempted. The highest skilled folks tend to finish within time.
It's counter-intuitive but the worst thing for an analyst is to work at a company that has a great ERP/BI tools with reliable data, etc. It's only about 10% of companies that have their shit together in that regard and those analyst just run reports from XYZ GUI and never have to work with data. So they have low level of Excel skills but think they are great analysts. I've never actually experienced that world, but I know their analysts wouldn't cut it in the real world of crappy data and ad-hoc work. I've seen them crash and burn too many times and it's painful for the entire team.
Back to your original point, as you might expect, most folks that are great at Excel just use it a lot to build complex things. They may have learned the keyboard shortcuts along the way; or not. It just takes practice and muscle memory will kick in but also requires regular practice to keep sharp at it. There's also some pretty decent tooling to help you step your game up if you wish. I personally like https://macabacus.com/