The user asking this question, who we'll call the aspiring freelancer, has done something most people skip. They looked at the market, read the jobs, and checked the competition. They saw thousands of freelancers on Upwork, many of them getting work. They saw Reddit's chorus of warnings: Excel is just a tool, clients already know it, only the hardest projects get outsourced. And instead of picking a side, they stopped and said: I don't know which version is true. That is not confusion. That is the beginning of real strategy.
The Reddit crowd isn't wrong that Excel is a tool. But tools have markets. Plumbers don't argue that a wrench is "just a tool", they argue about which wrench gets the job done faster. The aspiring freelancer noticed that small businesses post simple projects every day. Not complex financial models. Not macro-heavy automation. Just work that someone doesn't want to do themselves. That is not a market for experts. That is a market for reliable, competent people who can finish a task without hand-holding. The aspiring freelancer's logic holds here: if demand were nonexistent, the job boards would be empty. They are not.
What breaks the logic is the assumption that "Excel expert" is the goal. Clients hiring for simple tasks do not need an expert. They need someone who can clean a dataset, build a pivot table, or write a VLOOKUP without errors. The aspiring freelancer's plan to build a portfolio before entering the market is smart, but the portfolio should match the work they actually want to land. If they practice building complex dashboards nobody asked for, they will be overqualified for the jobs that exist and under-experienced for the jobs that don't. The faster path is to take five small real-world projects, even for free or low pay, and learn what clients actually request. That experience is worth more than a dozen self-assigned projects.
The aspiring freelancer should also consider Power BI, but not as a replacement. Excel and Power BI serve different stages of the same workflow. Excel handles data entry, cleaning, and ad-hoc analysis. Power BI handles visualization and reporting at scale. A freelancer who can do both can take a client's messy spreadsheet, clean it in Excel, and deliver a live dashboard in Power BI. That combination is harder to find than a pure Excel expert, and it justifies higher rates. The key is to learn one skill well enough to get the first job, then add the second skill based on what that first client asks for next.
The aspiring freelancer is not lost. They are asking the right question at the right time. The answer is not to become an Excel expert. The answer is to become the person who solves the specific problem the client already posted on Upwork today. Start with that one job. Then the next. The market will tell you what to learn next.