Heads up to all of my contacts who are still in the military as either a soldier or contractor. Do you have a regularly occurring brief or even just slides to update?

Microsoft Power Query will change your life. You already have access to unlimited Udemy courses through the sweet deal the Air Force got us using your .mil email address through organization login. Take a course on power query.

"Why should I take hours of my day to learn Power Query Mike? I don't have time for that nerd stuff. I've got soldiers to train, inventories to conduct, and OER's to sign"

I'm glad you asked. Know those hours upon hours you spend chasing down updates from everyone who owes them to you? Then you have to manually compile them, analyze them, and organize them in a way that is appealing to the "Boss" (your commander)? What if I told you that after spending the time to build this out on the front end, all you have to do is click refresh whenever you need updated metrics, already formatted exactly how you want and ready to email, print, or present?

Example: Us IT nerds have to report to the boss who is hitting yellow on DOD Cyber Awareness and *gasp* who is red. We report what systems are out of compliance and which systems are dangerously close to becoming out of compliance. We compile data on countless metrics and then present them to the boss.

Power Query enables you to automate ALL of this, to the point that you can automate reaching out and grabbing new reports from any source you have a connection to (doesn't need to be local, so you collaborate with your team for a central dump). Tasks that would have taken you all of Monday to brief on Tuesday are now automated in very literally 45 seconds, giving you the time to focus on actual analysis and improving the organization as a whole.

The implications of this are far reaching. I can't think of a single position I've held as an NCO that would NOT have benefited from learning this. For those of you in the senior ranks, this is something you want to get your junior NCO's and O's doing. Talk about an OER builder and career launching pad. You could even apply this to the NCOER's and OER's you have to write by having power query import the bullets that you can just copy and paste.

Go forth and look like the hero you deserve to look like at next week's command and staff!