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Excel Community articles

Read the latest support and guidance from the Excel Community, including our very popular Tip of the Week series.
Displaying 1-20 of 1364 results
Liam Bastick
Exclusive End of Monthly Month End Reporting Problems
  • 15 Jan 2026
  • Liam Bastick
As many of us return to work at the beginning of the new year, many of us reflect on our new year resolutions already broken, stalled weight loss programmes, giving up smoking failures, and, er, automating month end reporting. Well, maybe not the last one. However, monthly reporting is here to stay and the more we can reduce manual intervention the better. With 2026 now fully under way, I thought this would be a good time to consider how to work out – and automate – those month end dates for reporting purposes for once and for all.
Craig Stirk
Exclusive Using the Claude add-in for Excel – an initial exploration
  • 09 Jan 2026
  • Craig Stirk
The rapid emergence of large language models (LLMs) has already reshaped how many of us write, research and reason. The next frontier is more interesting for accountants and analysts - embedding those capabilities directly inside the tools we use every day. In this article, Craig Stirk, founder of Sarcul Consulting and Chief Innovation Officer at Sprift Technologies, explores using Claude’s add-in for Excel.
Headshot of Bani Lamba
Your 2026 Excel Community Guide
  • 09 Jan 2026
  • Bani Lamba
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.
Simon Hurst
Exclusive Questioning the value of training – part 1
  • 08 Jan 2026
  • Simon Hurst
Simon Hurst asserts that, while online resources and AI can solve Excel problems, structured training helps users identify the right problems, choose optimal solutions, and design better spreadsheets, preventing future issues.
James Berridge
Exclusive Excel Essentials for Auditors: Part 3 Techniques for stock and sales analysis
  • 02 Jan 2026
  • James Berridge
In this series, James Berridge, Director at Saffery LLP, explores core Excel functionality and essential skills that every auditor should master to support their audit roles. The last article in the series focuses on how to apply practical, audit-focused Excel features including pivot tables, lookups, dynamic arrays and more to analyse a realistic stock listing and sales dataset.
Simon Hurst
Exclusive 2025 - look back in archive
  • 17 Dec 2025
  • Simon Hurst
The Excel Community archive portal categorises the community’s articles in a number of ways, including by year; Spreadsheet Competency Framework level; series/topic; author and allocated keyword. In this post we are going to look at the contents of the archive for the year just ending.
Simon Hurst
Exclusive Formula by Example – like Flash Fill but actually useful
  • 09 Dec 2025
  • Simon Hurst
Some users find the Excel Flash Fill feature useful, while others find the significant limitation of it only being able to create static text too much of a compromise. Enter the new, AI-powered, enhancement: Formula by Example. It works in a similar way but creates a formula rather than static text, making it much more useful and automatic.
Ruth Butler-Lee
Exclusive The pros and cons of using Dynamic Arrays in Excel
  • 08 Dec 2025
  • Ruth Butler-Lee
In a recent webinar, Ruth Butler-Lee, Head of Financial Modelling at Arriva UK Trains Ltd, covered a practical introduction to dynamic arrays in Excel and how they can be used to address the common problems faced when using traditional Excel formulas in financial modelling. In this article, Ruth returns to share a summary of the pros and cons of using dynamic arrays.
James Berridge
Exclusive Excel Essentials for Auditors: Part 2 Text Functions
  • 08 Dec 2025
  • James Berridge
In this series, James Berridge, Director at Saffery LLP, explores core Excel functionality and essential skills that every auditor should master to support their audit roles. The second article focuses on practical text-based functions and techniques in Excel that make extracting, splitting and recombining information from a trial balance (TB) easier and more efficient.
David Beniam
New tech features for Sep-Nov 2025: Excel, Teams, Google Sheets, Chat GPT, M365, Power BI, Canva, Zoom ++
  • 05 Dec 2025
  • David Benaim
Our digest of new features across Microsoft 365 & other business tech products in written, images & video format covering the last three months.
Lego graph image
EXCEL COMMUNITY ROUND UP Excel Community round up - November 2025
  • 01 Dec 2025
  • Excel Community
Here are all the new Excel blogs and webinars from the Excel Community in November 2025.
James Berridge
Exclusive Excel Essentials for Auditors: Part 1 Practical Tips from the Ground Up
  • 26 Nov 2025
  • James Berridge
In this series, James Berridge, Director at Saffery LLP, explores core Excel functionality and essential skills that every auditor should master to support their audit roles. This first article focuses on navigation and basic formula tips, builds onto easy text manipulation, and highlights the use cases for lookups and pivot tables in substantive testing.
Headshot of Bani Lamba
This year’s 10 best Excel highlights
  • 24 Nov 2025
  • Bani Lamba
As we approach a new year, it’s time to reflect on some of the content and highlights from the Excel Community in 2025 and look ahead as Excel continues to change and develop with new functionality. Whether you’re new or an existing member, in this article we invite you to explore the insights and learnings the community has delivered for you over this last year.
David Beniam
Excel speed up productivity tricks
  • 21 Nov 2025
  • David Benaim
Have you ever wanted to be the guy that amazes everyone by doing all the Excel actions in 3 moves instead of 13? This article is the first in a series of speed up tricks in Excel. Here we are talking about number formats and special characters.
Liam Bastick
Exclusive Partial Unpivoting
  • 20 Nov 2025
  • Liam Bastick
Sometimes, when you work with pivoted data that has a structure similar to a PivotTable, it is difficult to look up a value based on multiple column and row criteria. To make it simpler, we usually unpivot the data. Most of the time, you may choose to use the ‘Unpivot columns’ function in Power Query.
Simon Hurst
Exclusive Condition formatting - beyond icons
  • 17 Nov 2025
  • Simon Hurst
Having covered some of the advanced options available for working with conditional formatting Icon Sets in previous posts, this time we will look at the advanced options available for the other graphical conditional formats: Data Bars and Colour Scales.
Headshot of Mark Proctor
Exclusive Why blank cells calculate as zero and does it matter?
  • 14 Nov 2025
  • Mark Proctor
This article explores how Excel treats blank cells. If handled incorrectly, a blank cell can cause calculation errors and produce misleading outputs. So, while they may seem insignificant, they can cause havoc.
Simon Hurst
Exclusive Dealing with complex conditional formatting rules simply
  • 10 Nov 2025
  • Simon Hurst
Last time, we continued our exploration of some of the advanced options available for working with Conditional Formatting Icon Sets.
Lego graph image
EXCEL COMMUNITY ROUND UP Excel Community round up - October 2025
  • 04 Nov 2025
  • Excel Community
Here are all the new Excel blogs and webinars from the Excel Community in October 2025.
Simon Hurst
Exclusive Making conditional formatting more interactive and more automatic
  • 27 Oct 2025
  • Simon Hurst
Last time, we delved into the advanced options available for working with Conditional Formatting Icon Sets. This time we will make use of the extra flexibility that putting the value in a cell allows us, and use an Excel Spin Button to set the value more easily. We will then explore the use of a formula to calculate the threshold value automatically.
Displaying 1-20 of 1364 results

Excel Community archive

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.

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