excel Archives - Page 3 of 4 - The Happy Finance Team

11th January 202222nd January 2025

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.

31st December 202118th January 2022

Tracking resolutions throughout the year (with Excel, obviously)

There’s no particular reason why you should listen to my views on how to keep to New Year’s resolutions. This quick blogpost is just to share a few thoughts. Excel is involved, obviously.

27th September 20217th May 2024

Creating dashboards in Excel – key skills

I attended an excellent livestream last week about Excel dashboards, presented by the legendary Chandoo. In his tutorial, he built a KPI dashboard in Excel in around an hour. As well as learning lots of useful tips, it also made me think about the key skills (Excel and otherwise) that you need to build a great dashboard.

24th August 202124th August 2021

Power Query for accountants – enhance your trial balance

Power Query has been out for over a decade and yet the majority of accountants I meet still seem unaware of what it can do for them.

A possible issue is that it is usually presented in the context of Power BI, and analysing Big Data. And the type of people who like to talk about that also like to talk about other scary things such as VBA and SQL. There aren’t many training resources or articles focussing on Power Query for accountants more generally.

*Perhaps we all need a lightbulb moment.* *Photo by Zach Lucero on Unsplash*

18th June 20219th March 2026

Why aren’t you using Excel Tables?

Cells A2 – F8 show an Excel Table. The data in rows 10-12 is in a tabular format but is not a Table.

Excel Tables (capital T) have been part of Excel since the 2007 edition. Given it is so old, why is it still common to see spreadsheets holding and calculating data but not using Tables?

A quick internet search will reveal tonnes of articles about why you should use Excel tables.

Here is a really good one, for example.

However, in this post, I thought I would explore this from a different angle, to try to understand people’s reluctance to use this amazingly useful tool.

30th March 202130th March 2021

Excel design tips for non-designers

I have the visual sense of a blind goat, but over the years I have picked up a number of Excel design tips which I apply to any spreadsheet that someone else has to look at.

This post sets out ten areas which you can look at to make your spreadsheets cleaner and more professional.

I’ve written this post on the assumption that you are reading spreadsheets online, but most of these Excel design tips also work for printed documents.

1. Turn off Gridlines

The first tip is the easiest – turn off gridlines. Gridlines are the lines marking the rows and columns.

29th September 202029th September 2020

Five things I learned from auditing

Like many finance professionals, I began my career in audit. Here are five things that I learned from auditing and still use many years later.

5th June 202010th June 2020

Finance team recruitment

Photo by Christina @ wocintechchat.com on Unsplash

With over ten years experience in senior finance positions, I’ve recruited quite a few finance team members, and helped others do the same. I’ve learned what works for me when it comes to finance team recruitment.

Most of this is applicable to any candidate search process but I’ve added a few thoughts throughout about what might be different about recruiting finance team members.

19th May 202022nd January 2025

How to be a good Excel user

What do you need to learn to be “good at Excel”? What Excel training should be mandatory for finance teams?

I really rate the ICAEW’s spreadsheet competency framework as a tool to use to diagnose where you and your team are at and where you should be. It breaks down users into four types – Basic, General, Creator and Developer – and allocates the skills that each level should have.

This is much more helpful to me than users saying that they are “intermediate” or “advanced” users. When I recruit for roles I often use the framework in the job description.

27th April 202011th May 2020

A smooth year end accounts process

Plan ahead to make your year end run smoothly — Photo by Bill Oxford on Unsplash

If you’re managing a finance team, at some point you (or someone in the team) will need to prepare some kind of year end accounts, also known as statutory accounts. I’ve been doing this for many years now and in this post I will share my observations about what makes for a smooth year end process.

The short version of this; planning in advance will always reap dividends. As you will see, most of my advice concerns things you can and should be doing well in advance of year end.