As we step into the new year, we warmly welcome all our members, both existing and new to the growing Excel Community. With new articles, over 500 tips, thought leadership pieces, and a wide selection of webinars, the community offers a wealth of resources for everyone, no matter your skill level. Here’s a guide to help you get started and make the most of your experience in the community this year.
Over the last year, the Excel Community has continued to grow and now exceeds 43,000 members, keeping its spot as one of ICAEW’s largest communities. As the community keeps growing, so does Excel’s functionality. Last year we saw significant changes, including the enhancement of AI capabilities through Copilot, and a range of new functions including GROUPBY, PIVOTBY and TRIMRANGE to name a few. We cover more on these advancements and some of our highlights from 2025 in this round-up of our 10 Best Excel Highlights.
In 2026, we intend to cover more relevant content and topics through articles, interactive webinars, and on-demand content to help you Excel wherever you are in your professional and learning journey.
What you can look forward to in 2026
As more functions and features continue to be released and become more widely available in Excel, we will continue to share use cases and practical examples in new and creative ways for our members to make the most of them. We’ll be kicking things off with a webinar introducing Excel's three new Regex functions, demonstrating how they can be combined with functions such as IF, FILTER, and XLOOKUP to simplify pattern matching. We expect more developments in the AI space too, with the highly anticipated COPILOT function likely to be rolled out, as well as the wider availability of Agent Mode, while third-party AI tools such as ChatGPT and Claude are also increasingly capable of supporting the development of sophisticated spreadsheets. We’ll provide content to support community members in their exploration of these tools once they become established.
Financial modelling is a crucial area in how Excel is used. Over the last couple of years, we updated our ‘Financial Modelling Code’. This year, we will expand our content in this area by delivering a webinar series starting from the basics, aimed at supporting those new to financial modelling to learn the fundamentals, and further content for the more experienced professionals to refine their models and further develop their skills.
We are committed to delivering content that focuses on fundamentals most valued by our members. In line with this, we are excited to bring our members a fresh take on our most popular webinars, such as the Tips and Tricks Live sessions, where you can share your Excel questions and quandaries for our experts to tackle. In the first Tips and Tricks Live session of 2026, our much loved specialists John Tennent and David Lyford-Tilly join forces to help solve your Excel problems.
This year, you will still be able to choose between comprehensive hour-long interactive sessions, perfect for addressing your questions, or our shorter, bitesize webinars designed to help you quickly learn handy new tips. We look forward to bringing you a new Lunch and Learn series later this year. We will also carry on with our bi-yearly updates covering the latest in Excel and other most-used business software.
In addition to webinars, we'll keep sharing tips and demos through our articles. This year, we will continue sharing more articles that featuring follow-along video demos, such as James Berridge's new series on Excel essentials for auditors. We also plan to continue delivering quarterly digests on the latest in Excel and other tech from Microsoft MVP David Benaim. After reaching a milestone of 500 tips and tricks articles last year, we're planning to publish even more this year! Lastly, across ICAEW, we've been sharing helpful tips and more Excel-focused content in ICAEW Insights and podcasts, we'll keep bringing these resources to you.
We recognise that our thought leadership is essential in offering broader guidance and best practice in using spreadsheets effectively. This year, our focus will be on delivering an updated version of our ‘Spreadsheet Competency Framework’ to provide our members with an enhanced and modern structure for evaluating proficiency in using Excel.
One of our goals has been to provide our members with opportunities to attend in-person events to network and learn from a wide range of experts in this space. After the success of our ICAEW Excel meet-up last year, celebrating Excel’s 40th anniversary, we’ll be looking to hold another networking event in 2026. Similarly, in 2025 we partnered with the Global Excel Summit, a conference featuring some of the top names in the world of Excel, as well as some popular ICAEW members and Excel Community contributors. The 2026 conference is scheduled to take place in London on 19 and 20 May and ICAEW is again one of the conference partners. Excel Community members get an exclusive discount on tickets to attend the conference through, you can find out more on our homepage. If you plan on attending, we look forward to seeing you there!
Explore our existing resources
With over 1,000 articles, over 500 tips, 4 thought leadership guides and an extensive archive of webinar recordings, we realise that it can sometimes be tricky to find what you’re looking for.
Don’t forget that our main page at icaew.com/excel, is split into relevant categories to make it easier to navigate the community and find relevant content including our latest articles, a complete index of our 500+ Excel Tips and Tricks, all of our upcoming events and webinars and an archive of most of our webinar recordings.
We have an extensive archive of content which extends to our legacy ION platform. The archive section in the community, allows you to search the ION archive by keyword. You can also browse the archive index, or, for a more interactive experience, use this Power BI dashboard featuring all articles tagged by keyword, author and date. Simon Hurst, one of our longstanding contributors to the community, also covers more on how to explore our 2025 content using the portal.
Get involved!
We have a LinkedIn group for our members to share tips and ask questions. You can join this group to find more resources, ask questions, and discuss areas of interest with experts and your peers. You’ll also find more bitesize Excel tips posted regularly on our social channels including Instagram and TikTok.
We’re also keen to involve you, our community members, in our content. We have some plans in the pipeline, but in the meantime, if you have any suggestions for topics, or have an Excel problem that you’d love for us to help solve, please don’t hesitate to email us at excel@icaew.com. Here’s to 2026!
Archive and Knowledge Base
This archive of Excel Community content from the ION platform will allow you to read the content of the articles but the functionality on the pages is limited. The ION search box, tags and navigation buttons on the archived pages will not work. Pages will load more slowly than a live website. You may be able to follow links to other articles but if this does not work, please return to the archive search. You can also search our Knowledge Base for access to all articles, new and archived, organised by topic.
