Help and ideas for busy numbers people
Structuring data in spreadsheets is really important for producing good financial models and reports.
However, data designed for humans to read should look different from data designed for computers to read.
Continue reading “Structuring data in spreadsheets – for humans and computers”
Does GROUPBY replace pivot tables?
The new functions GROUPBY and PIVOTBY are now available in the current channel of Microsoft Excel, and I’ve been playing with them to try to answer this question.
My conclusion is that it isn’t a simple yes/no answer. What is more useful to think about is “when” or “how” GROUPBY should be used instead of a pivot table – and vice versa.
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I attended the 2025 Global Excel Summit last week – this time in person for the first time.
It’s become a bit of a tradition that I blog about what I learned, so here goes!
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REGEX formulas in Excel are now rolling out in the current channel of Excel, just in time for Christmas.
In this post I want to explain why most Excel users, not just hardcore geeks, should be interested in this.
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I posted on LinkedIn a couple of weeks ago about creating an Excel template to calculate budget impact of the changes to Employer’s National Insurance.
In this post I’ll share a few observations, both about the calculations and also the act of creating the template.
Continue reading “Creating an Excel template to calculate Employer’s National Insurance changes”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.
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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”
I recently designed and delivered some Excel training for auditors. Specifically, it was Excel training for audit trainees who had just started at the firm.
I benefitted enormously at the start of my career when my employer arranged for all new audit trainees to have Excel training as part of our induction. Even though it was pretty basic, it established a good grounding in things like formula construction, absolute and relative cell references, and a few shortcuts.
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