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?”Why you should use Cell Styles in Excel
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”How to fix #SPILL errors in Excel Tables
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”Ten things I learned at the Global Excel Summit 2024
I attended the Global Excel Summit 2024 online earlier this month, and in no particular order, here are ten things I learned.
1. Power Query at Chanel
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”Excel training for auditors
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.
Continue reading “Excel training for auditors”Why I don’t have a standard Intermediate Excel course
I don’t offer a standard Intermediate Excel course (or indeed, a standard Beginners course or a standard Advanced course).
There are a couple of reasons for this.
Firstly, I tailor all Excel training that I deliver to the needs of the course participants.
Continue reading “Why I don’t have a standard Intermediate Excel course”Why does my pivot table default to Count?
If your pivot table defaults to Count instead of Sum, then you have inconsistent numerical data.
I found this out on a webinar about five years ago, and it still seems to be a mostly unknown feature.
And yes, I call it a feature, not a bug, because it is ultimately helping you.
What it is doing is giving you an immediate message that your numerical data has gaps, or perhaps has numbers formatted as text, or other errors. If you ignore this, you might produce inaccurate analysis.
So – if your pivot table defaults to Count, don’t do what I used to do, which was to tut and manually change it to Sum.
Investigate your data carefully until you’ve found the inconsistencies and then try it again until it defaults to Sum. Here’s a link to some suggestions for converting text to numbers.
I love training finance teams in Excel and Power Query – have a look here at what I can do for you.
What do I mean by bespoke Excel training?
I offer bespoke Excel training (and tailored Power Query training), particularly to finance teams. But what do I mean by “bespoke”?
Continue reading “What do I mean by bespoke Excel training?”Five things I learned at the Global Excel Summit 2022
Last week I “went” to the Global Excel Summit. This is a three day event featuring many of the superstars of Excel, eg Leila Gharani, Chandoo, Wyn Hopkins, Oz du Soleil etc etc. It was virtual this year, but as I’d never been before I didn’t know what to expect anyway.
I learned way more than five things, of course, but here are my biggest takeaways.
Continue reading “Five things I learned at the Global Excel Summit 2022”The five most useful new Excel functions for finance teams
This post sets out the five most useful new Excel functions for finance teams, based on my experience. By “new” I mean available in 2019 or later versions of Excel (including Office 365).
Note – this post was written in January 2022 and reflects what was available at that time.
Many of us are self-taught in Excel, and it can be hard to keep up with the changes. In the past few years there have been loads of new Excel functions that replace and add to existing ones that you might be familiar with.
Continue reading “The five most useful new Excel functions for finance teams”