2025 – look back in archive

As we approach the end of 2025, we are going to look back at the range of articles added to the Excel Community over the year as revealed by the archive portal. Here is the main page of the portal with 2025 selected in the column chart by year visualisation, at the bottom right:

Selecting the 2025 column filters the other visualisations to show only 2025 content. The first thing to note is the slight reduction in the number of written articles over the past few years. This demonstrates a move towards producing a wider range of content types such as live webinars, the recordings of which are also made available as part of the community resources. In addition, many community Excel training resources are now available.

Just to the left of the years column chart, another column chart shows the spread of articles across the Spreadsheet Competency Framework categories of Basic, General, Creator and Developer.

The list of series and topics covered in 2025 shows the continuation of the very long running ‘Tips and Tricks’ articles. This series was formerly known as ‘Tip of the week’ but has been given a more appropriate name now that articles for the series are no longer posted weekly. Despite the change in frequency, 2025 saw the publication of the 500th article in the series. Moving from a long running series to a new one, James Berridge has just embarked on a series that looks at vital Auditor Skills.

‘Productivity and Automation’ covers most of the articles that don’t fit into a particular series but generally cover ways to make use of Excel more efficient. This year’s new ‘Lunch and Learn’ series includes 5 articles by frequent contributor John Tennent on using visualisations in Excel. Inspired by the final Gavin and Stacy episode last Christmas, the articles in the ‘What’s Occurrin’?’ series deal with a dozen different oddities which might make you wonder why Excel is doing what it’s doing. The content of the other series is fairly self-explanatory. For ‘Modelling 101’ Liam Bastick deals with solutions to practical modelling problems. The community has always appreciated the importance of keeping its members up to date with Excel changes, and David Benaim contributes a quarterly Update post that covers other key business applications as well as spreadsheets. Finally, the posts in the Round-up series provide a periodic summary of the recent posts.

We have allocated one or more keywords to most of our articles and our portal uses a ‘word cloud’ visualisation to show all the keywords, with the font size indicating the relative number of articles that have had that keyword allocated to them. Clicking on a keyword will display just those articles. In order to make the keywords a bit easier to see, the portal includes a separate keywords page.

As on the Main page, clicking on individual columns in the years column chart will display the keywords in use for the articles posted in that year and gives an idea of the most popular subjects. As you can see, for 2025 Dynamic Arrays featured in the most articles (14) with a three-way tie between Copilot, the GROUPBY function and Power Query for second place, with 6 articles each:

Clicking on the columns for previous years in turn also provides an interesting summary of how the topics covered in the community have changed over time. You can try this out yourself using the embedded version of the portal below.

You can explore all of this year’s articles, and indeed articles on all aspects of Excel, for yourself in the Power BI based ICAEW Excel archive portal:

The 'Open in full-screen mode' icon in the bottom right-hand corner of the embedded report should show the contents at a more readable size with the Escape key returning you to the post.