Formatting my life

Face-to-face interviews are always nerve-wracking businesses and having to sit exams beforehand does not make it easier.  I claimed familiarity with Excel and though I believed it, having composing an Excel report once (at 3am in the morning) ahead of a job interview.  At this different one though, I was completely exposed, pathetically guessing and though I feel I gave a good account of myself against three interviewers, I was blown out of the water by an inability to source large organisations within a pre-designed spreadsheet.
It was this humiliation that made me determined to take Excel courses paid for by my current organisation.  I can justify it from a work perspective but it is also important for personal development with a view to the future.  Getting down to brass tacks, a month ago I attended an Excel introductory course and found out how lacking my knowledge was since I essentially gave up on Excel in 1998.  I definitely could not have done the intermediate session, that I did today, from a standing start.
Usually, when I attend courses at Victoria, I have to wait weeks for human resources to email me the notes from a session (one bad occasion took four months on Notebook training) and by that moment, much of what I learned disappears into the ether.  Like a language for a non-specialist linguist, such technical demands need constant practice, not shoved into a half-remembered recess in the mind.  When HR sent me the notes for the introductory training, I got the notes from the intermediate course and only partially covering the subject at that.  Clever me, noticing that in the London folders, there were Word documents covering both basic and intermediate with exercises to practise upon.  I thereupon attached them to an email and sent it to myself.  When I pitch up at Excel Advanced in December, finally I may be up to speed.