Help and ideas for busy numbers people
How do you learn more Power Query? This is a post addressed to people who have already learned initial navigation and have played around with a few of the buttons. Perhaps you attended one of my Introduction to Power Query courses.
Finance teams almost always lead digital transformation projects, but should they?
This thought came to me while I was enduring a financial systems sales pitch that I’d accidentally ended up in. (I’m normally good at avoiding these now, I must have had my guard down).
As they droned on about how we could finally be free of spreadsheets, I started to think; what if we (finance) are the problem here?
This is a quick post to explain why EOMONTH doesn’t work with # references (dynamic ranges) and what to do about it.
Continue reading “EOMONTH doesn’t work with # references – help?”I’m a late adopter of Cell Styles in Excel. Before I started doing financial modelling and consulting work for other people, I didn’t really appreciate how useful they were.
I wish I’d learned them a lot earlier as they would have been helpful in earlier roles, too.
Continue reading “Why you should use Cell Styles in Excel”
This blog post sets out how to prevent or fix #SPILL errors in Excel Tables. Contrary to what Microsoft Help says, they might sometimes be fixable.
Continue reading “How to fix #SPILL errors in Excel Tables”How do you connect to a Sharepoint folder in Power Query if you don’t have “from Sharepoint folder” as an option?
Continue reading “No “From Sharepoint Folder” option in Power Query? No problem!”
I was going to write a detailed guide about using flags in financial modelling. However, there’s already a really good one here, as part of the ICAEW’s financial modelling good practice guide(s).
So instead I’ll just write something more simple to explain why you might want to use flags in financial modelling. And add a specific point about dynamic arrays, which are a newish development in Excel.
Continue reading “Using flags in financial modelling”Here are five tips for using Googlesheets if you normally use Excel.
If you’ve imported it from Excel, it might still be an Excel file that’s being read by Google in compatibility mode. You can tell because name and file type of the workbook will end in XLSX.
This is the worst of both worlds, as you are getting neither Excel nor Google functionality. Save the file as a Google sheet (in the file menu)
I attended the Global Excel Summit 2024 online earlier this month, and in no particular order, here are ten things I learned.
The most inspiring session was given by two people who work for Chanel, who explained how they had used Power Query to reduce thousands of hours of processing time.
In the middle of a day that was focussed on the theoretical uses of AI, it was fantastic to hear about a tried and tested but scandalously underused technology being used to deliver real business change.
More generally their approach to business process improvement sounded fascinating and I’d love to see this become more widely known.
Continue reading “Ten things I learned at the Global Excel Summit 2024”
At a recent webinar, the presenter led by suggesting that in these tough economic times there is more of a need for live financial data. (They may have been selling a product).
I think it’s much more about the decisions that you need to take from the financial data.
Continue reading “The need for live financial data (or not)”