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”What do I mean by Excel consultancy?
Here are some examples of financial modelling and Excel consultancy work I’ve done in the last six months;
Continue reading “Excel consultancy – what is it?”
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.
Continue reading “Does Groupby replace pivot tables?”
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!
Continue reading “What I learned at the 2025 Global Excel Summit”
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.
Continue reading “How to fix #SPILL errors in Excel Tables”
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”
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”