Help and ideas for busy numbers people
Last year, I attended my first Global Excel Summit in person. The experience was so good I immediately booked for 2026 as soon as tickets were available.
As is now tradition, here’s my annual blog on what I learned. And yes, I’ve booked for 2027 already!
Continue reading “What I learned at the 2026 Global Excel Summit”
I promise there is some Excel in this post – skip to the end if that’s what you’re here for.
This post is about both the book and film versions of Project Hail Mary. I’m making this post spoiler free, but the links I include may contain spoilers so follow at your own risk. When I first read the book a few years back I was lucky to have no prior knowledge about it or any of the plot points, and I think it made it that much more thrilling. So if you have the chance to enjoy either the book or film without knowing anything first, then I don’t want to take that away from you!
Continue reading “Excel and Project Hail Mary (spoiler free)”Dates in Excel – the subject of many an internet meme. There’s a common perception that Excel is baffling when it comes to dates.
And this is actually a bit unfair, because it’s got quite a bit better in the last few years at not randomly inserting dates everywhere.
So I thought it would be useful to set out a few principles of how they behave and why. I am using UK date formats in this post.
Continue reading “Dates in Excel – how they work”
It’s been a year since I started introducing people to Power Query through my standalone Introduction to Power Query course.
I attended the Intro to Power Query course and cannot recommend it highly enough. Game changer!Â
Before this point, my business model had been solely focussed on providing bespoke Excel training to teams.
Sometimes this would include some Power Query content, and over time I had developed quite a bit of material for Power Query training. My Power Query training is always really popular with people who use Excel a lot. They just don’t often know it exists.
It occurred to me that my training model might not suit some people who would really benefit from PQ training. For example, if they are the sole finance person in their organisation. Or if they work as a consultant.
And so this time last year, I decided to trial a few sessions where I asked people to register an interest. I then organised these people into groups of 3-4, so that I could deliver a classroom-like training session.
I wasn’t sure what to expect, but there was quite a lot of initial take up. And I was delighted that people who did go on the course often recommended it to others. My feedback forms for the courses have been incredibly positive.
We spent an intense four hours learning all about PQ – with Jess providing sample data for us to use so that we could not just watch/listen – but really get ‘hands on’ with the tool – and learning much faster as a result.
Those who I’ve trained appreciate the hands-on nature of the course. And that the examples come from my practical experience. Delegates can follow along and there’s plenty of time to ask questions or go over things. We often have good conversations too, where delegates share ideas for future uses.
The course was brilliant – incredibly useful and perfectly paced. There were many penny drop moments where we realised something was going to save us so much time…..
Highly recommend to FDs/FCs, finance teams and anyone that plays around in excel.
I love introducing people to Power Query. It’s fantastic to see them realise how much time they can save by using it, and how easy it is to get fast results. I would love to do more of this in 2026.
You can read more here about why Power Query is so useful for Excel users and you can contact me if you’d like to arrange some Power Query training for you or your team.
I recently sat and passed the Advanced Financial Modelling qualification. Here are a few of my thoughts about the qualification and what I learned.
Continue reading “What I learned from my Advanced Financial Modelling qualification”
People sometimes ask: “Can you give us an example of Power Query uses”?
(In fact, they often ask, “Can you give us an example of Power Query use cases” but I hate that phrase with a passion and refuse to use case it.)
So here are some very recent examples of Power query uses from a part-time FD role that I’m doing at the moment. It’s for a small but not tiny charity with lots of systems that don’t talk to each other.
Continue reading “Power Query uses – small charity edition”
I’ve only recently started including material on using Copilot with Excel in my bespoke training courses.
The reasons for my reticence are as follows;
Continue reading “Using Copilot with Excel – what I train”You can get a very long way in Power Query without using code.
Power Query is a tremendously useful tool for cleaning, processing and shaping your data. You can use it to create repeatable processes and save hours of time.
It comes with a neat User Interface (UI), which gives you hundreds of buttons to click to transform your data. Need to remove junk header rows, extract account codes, calculate figures net of VAT? There are buttons for all of those things.
However, if you get stuck and search for help with Power Query, you’ll almost certainly find the explanation given in M code, which is the code behind Power Query. (Every time you click a button, you’re generating code.)
Excel is 40 this year, and I decided to mark the occasion by creating a zine.
Continue reading “Excel at 40 Zine!”In the video above (which is silent), I’ve used Excel’s camera tool to toggle between different versions of the same chart.
This post was inspired by Juliana Smith and I had enormous help from this article by Chandeep Chhabra to get to the solution.
Continue reading “Using the camera tool to toggle charts”