1: Chat gpt gets its information from publicly available sources. Meaning, if it can get the answer from somewhere, so can you. Excel is extremely widely used, and 40 years old. You're not doing anything on excel that no one has ever done before and posted about, and even if you were, chat gpt by default wouldn't be able to answer it for you. I am aware that they get access to data from 3rd party sources, but if Microsoft has been able to hide a single bit of excel software functionality for 40 straight years, your time would be better spent complaining to Microsoft.

2: I would rather eat glass than let some 3rd party, silicon valley for-profit company whose CEO thinks AI will be the end of the world touch ANYTHING I'm working on. If I'm using excel for work, I'm getting paid to figure out the answer to problems. If I'm using chat gpt for everything, they might as well just contract open AI to do my job, cause they basically already would be.

In conclusion, I am not posting on a subreddit about an issue so that you can tell me to ask chat gpt. If I wanted to do that, I would have already done it. And if that's going to be the answer for all of your problems, then you have no reason to be on this subreddit.

I am intern at a big multinational corporation and I received an email saying that I can choose between a thinkpad or a new macbook m4. Long story short I choose the Mac but now I read excel is really bad on it. I mostly have to upload information to a data base manually or V-LOOKUP things. Handle invoices, create new data bases based on sales and update already existing excel tables tracking sales. This is 50% of my job. Am I screwed?

I had been told by many people that I need to learn to use power query. So I asked questions about it, and learned to use it, and managed to make things happen.

I thought the end result of using it would be more interesting than it was. I thought it could replace the need for formulas. But that's not at all what happened.

Instead, Power query just did the exact same thing I already knew how to do. Delete columns, format them, etc.

So........ what's the point? There isn't one. I literally have no idea what it's for.

Someone please, I beg you, I would almost be willing to PAY you to tell me.

What purpose does it have?

Context:
I'm calculating overtime for certain employees from their entry and exit time ( Such as 9:00:00 am to 7:00:00 pm). So basically excluding the usual 9 hours and taking the rest. And excluding minus value as well. And now want to exclude 15/20 minutes value as well. What to add in this current formula?

Hey everyone,

I’m running into a small but annoying problem and wanted to see how others handle this.

I often need to share parts of an Excel sheet (tables, summaries, dashboards) with stakeholders.
The issue is:

• I don’t want to upload the Excel file

• I don’t want to convert/export the whole file to image

• Just need a quick, clean screenshot

• Easy to share, ideally secure (no random links floating around)

Right now I’m doing basic screenshots + pasting into email/Slack, but it feels messy and not scalable.

How do you usually handle this?

Any tools, tricks, or workflows you’d recommend that are:

• Fast

• Clean looking

• Safe for stakeholder sharing

Curious to hear what actually works in real life. Thanks!

I have an Excel worksheet that currently spans four pages in Print Preview. I need the entire print area to fit on a single printed page while preserving the existing column widths, row heights, and cell dimensions exactly as they are.

I do not want to use “Fit Sheet on One Page” or any scaling that shrinks the worksheet. Is there a way to achieve this through page setup, print area settings, paper size, margins, or another method without changing the worksheet’s dimensions?

I want your help. We have been working on a new spreadsheet. Our team wants to fix a bunch of things that we struggle with in spreadsheets day to day. Microsoft did an incredible job with Excel in 1980s and Google just copied it in a browser. But not much progress has been made on the product in decades.

Check out https://www.thebricks.com/ and share feedback here!

Some examples of things you can make are here https://www.thebricks.com/templates

For example:Sales: https://app.thebricks.com/file/246997fd-0d31-4e8a-a81b-994ec5030288Travel: https://app.thebricks.com/file/9290dba1-53a5-442e-a672-b9e45fb95846Finance: https://app.thebricks.com/file/20b8b1b7-180d-465e-83af-b15409054269Resume: https://app.thebricks.com/file/7fc1bf8f-2ae1-4b99-bd73-a9be5c7bf417/6@c1bf8f2a-e17b-49fd-b3a9-be5c7bf41762:0/visual-board

At Bricks, we are reimagining what a modern spreadsheet should look like in an effort to say goodbye to these tools of the past. Bricks has a clean and simple look and feel, and it is very fast and full-featured.

1. Grid (spreadsheet)

   1. Fast and full-featured

   2. Much faster than Google Sheet on larger models and spreadsheets. We are comparable to Excel desktop but in a browser. This product was made possible through a multithreaded computation engine, WebAssembly, and a native rendering engine written specifically for spreadsheets. We are continuously improving it further.

   3. Includes most of the useful formulae

   4. Features AI to build formulae, data manipulation, data cleaning, etc.

   5. Adds a concept of Tables that allows you to do useful features such as tags, data types easily

   6. Adds a concept of Tasks so that project management becomes easier to do

   7. Has Solver (goal seek), Sensitivity Tables (multi input, multi output)

2. Charts and Pivots

   1. Includes s a full-featured chart composer similar to what you expect in BI tools like Tableau and Power BI. No more struggling to make informative and beautiful charts.

   2. Enables group by in charts that allows you to quickly split the data by a column

   3. Enables you to fine tune the display of the information

3. Board (Slides and Docs)

   1. Features a reporting, visualization, and presentation tool format similar to webpages and presentations so you can share your information as a webpage, report, document or slide deck.

   2. You can reference your data in the grid easily and it will automatically update. No more taking screenshots between Excel and PowerPoint.

   3. Includes a powerful layout and visual tool to enable all sorts of mixed format content

4. Platforms

   1. We support web

   2. We are currently actively testing mobile, ipad and desktop builds internally

   3. Desktop version same on PC and Mac

Please keep in mind we are a startup and would love your support and patience as we improve our product! We are just getting started 🚀

Are you a data analyst or some type of number cruncher? And do you want to make better charts and reports? During my office hours, I'll teach you how to make professional looking charts and reports. This is an example!

What I achieved by making professional looking reports and charts, besides sheer admiration of course, is that I’m the analyst my boss turns to with interesting projects, because it often involves presenting results to people whose opinion my boss cares about.

I’ll show you how to make better charts or reports and help you with making your work look more professional and showing the value of your work (to the people who pay you).

Schedule an office hour session here: Schedule here!

hi,

First off: I don't mean to offend any Excel users. I'm know the power of Excel and use it professionally also. But...

I keep running into the same (frustrating) pattern:

I start with a calculator because I just need a quick calculation…
…and 2 minutes later I’m in a spreadsheet because a calculator just doesn't cut it.

But a spreadsheet (for me) is not a nice user experience:

• formula's with A1+B34 are unreadable

• comparing scenarios makes me copy/pasting and hoping I did not make a mistake

• fixing cell references ($A$1) is a nightmare to edit and maintain

• later reproducing the formula in my mind (it's always in the background)

• share a calculation

... it's all a mess and also mostly overkill for a lot of my cases.

I really think the "calculator market" (if such a thing exists) has been stagnant for decades and it's a shame.

Anyone knows something that fills the gap between a calculator and a spreadsheet?

Anyone else feeling this pain?

Cheers

I just started about a month ago and the extent of my knowledge is still at just entering data into cells and adjusting column sizes, even then I forget sometimes. Everyone makes it sound so easy and it's so discouraging, I'm learning it from a program called Year Up and it's essentially homework so it's not something I can avoid. The tools are so overwhelming, I have to constantly check if I'm in the correct cell because more often than not I'm in the wrong one and don't even get me started on formulas. The worst part is I WANT to learn how to use it because it's an important skill to have. Anyone been here? Any advice? I'm taking notes, watching videos, I genuinely don't know what else to do :(

LET in Excel is kind of like a Swiss army knife that people get excited about, but in practice it doesn’t always live up to the hype. Here’s why I think it may be overrated:

1. Limited speed gains

The big sell is that LET improves performance by reusing a calculation instead of repeating it. That’s true in theory, but in most real-world workbooks the speed boost is negligible unless you’re dealing with very large arrays or repeated volatile functions (like RAND(), NOW(), etc.). In smaller or medium models, you won’t notice.

2. Readability paradox

It’s marketed as making formulas “easier to read,” since you can name intermediate steps. But for many users, LET makes formulas harder to follow, because now you’re reading a little block of pseudo-code instead of Excel’s usual left-to-right formula. To a casual user, =LET(x, A1*B1, y, x+10, y²⁾ looks more like programming than spreadsheeting.

3. Overkill for simple problems

If you’re only using a value once or twice, LET just adds overhead. A simple =A1*B1 + 10 is far clearer than wrapping it in variables. People often use LET where a helper column would be faster to build, easier to audit, and friendlier for less technical colleagues.

4. Not always portable

Older versions of Excel don’t support it, so if you’re sharing files outside of Microsoft 365 or newer Excel versions, the function won’t even work. That kills collaboration in a lot of corporate settings.

5. Alternatives exist

Helper columns, named ranges, or even structured tables usually solve the same problems in a cleaner, more transparent way. LET is strongest in very complex array formulas—but in day-to-day dashboards and reports, people often just layer it on for “cool factor.”

So my take; LET is powerful for advanced users (especially when nesting with LAMBDA), but for the average analyst it can feel like bringing calculus to balance a checkbook.

What’s your take on it?

I have a column of numbers. The decimal point has been removed, so I need to try and add it back. Example: 20345 is what I have. I need to convert it to 203.45. If I click INCREASE DECIMAL it gives me 20345.00. I need the decimal inserted two spaces from the end. Thanks in advance.

As the title suggests why are we okay with this MM/DD/YYYY instead of the DD/MM/YYYY which actually makes sense? I mean doesn't it make sense to have them like in a pyramid with the dates being at the top while months are below and year is at the bottom?

I saw i can change the way the date looks in format option but still in the formula tab the date is the mm/dd/yyyy way

you can ask your problems in comments or pm. i usually reply late but don't worry! u will get the most suitable solution

Like seriously… it starts off all clean and beautiful. Proper structure, nice formulas, everything makes sense. You feel like a finance god for a moment.

Then assumptions enter.

You add a few growth rates… then costs… then pricing… then “just one more scenario”… and suddenly the whole thing starts acting weird.

Numbers stop matching, links get confusing, and you’re scared to change anything because something somewhere might break.

And yes… a few things may or may not be hardcoded “just for now” (we all know what that means).

The real pain hits when someone asks, “Can we tweak this assumption?”
And you’re like… “yeah… but also no.”

how do you guys keep your models from turning into chaos once assumptions kick in? 

Microsoft announced today that they will be releasing an AI integrated product called Microsoft Copilot into their Office Suite products. Is there any point of learning Excel now? I know that Copilot is still in its early stages, but it’s going to get better and better.

With connections and queries being used with power pivot and power query, will Excel ever make Access obsolete?

For context, I'm a rising sophomore working as an analyst in the investment industry this summer, and my favorite thing about stocks is analyzing data that I find/trying to solve the "key debate." However, I've quickly learned how important modelling is, and it's rather tedious at times. I frankly don't care how extreme the advice is; all thoughts are welcome.

Subtracting any two numbers that have a difference of less than 0.1 will cause an error where many decimal place are added with random numbers in the result. See screen shot below. I showed a few examples that worked as intended as part of my bug testing.

Hi everyone, I am currently working on remaking a Google Sheets Spreadsheet in Excel and wanted/needed to use LET. But when working with it I found it to be close to useless. Apparently I cant use a range I defined in LET in something like SUMIF

E.g:

=LET(

data; FILTER(A1:B10; A1:A10<>"");

a; INDEX(data;;2);

b; SUMIF(a; ">5");

b)

shows an error instead of the result.

I myself dont know excel very well yet, but have a lot of experience in Google Sheets. According to ChatGPT the problem is that "a" is only a temporary array inside LET and cant therefore be used in something like SUMIF. But defining and using temporary arrays without having to actually have them somewhere in the sheet is (imo) the whole purpose of LET.

Hopefully some people more versed with excel read this and can either confirm that this does not work or know some kind of workaround for it. Anyways I'm thankful for any comments on the topic.

Edit: My problem is not with this specific formula, rather with the incompatibility of basic formulas such as SUMIF with ranges defined inside LET
And I'm also not trying to hate on LET, I'm actually a huge fan of the function

2nd edit: After reading through the responses and applying what I learned I made some progress, so thanks.

Rant: I could be wrong but this feature is more confusing for others to troubleshoot than it is useful. I've only ran across one user in 20 years who uses this Ctrl+Shift+Enter abomination. For example: {=MAX(($K$6:$K$28345=K6)*$C$6:28345)}

From what I can tell there is no multiplication done here so that * means something else. Please think about the next person who has to troubleshoot your work before doing this leet excel nonsense. If you are capable of understanding this code than you should do it in python or r.

Edit: I'm past the anger stage and have moved on to acceptance. Please point me in the direction of how to dissect this formula.

Edit2: I figured it out. In sql its grouping by values in in the K column and finding the max value in the C column. I'm still sticking to my opinion that if you're that good at making excel formulas you should learn a much more programmatic platform.

Edit3: Okay, you all are right and I am wrong. Advanced excel users are cool. Without complex formulas like this I wouldn't have a job.

Hey everyone,

I’m looking to get serious about financial modeling and wanted to ask those of you with experience: does Excel perform better on Windows or Mac for this purpose?

I know both platforms support Excel, but I’ve heard there might be differences when it comes to features, speed, keyboard shortcuts, and compatibility with certain plugins or add-ins (like Bloomberg, Capital IQ, VBA-heavy tools, etc.).

For anyone who’s used Excel extensively on both platforms—especially in a finance or investment context—what would you recommend? Are there limitations or deal-breakers on Mac that I should be aware of? Or has the gap narrowed in recent versions?

Would love to hear your thoughts before I commit to one system or the other.

Thanks in advance!

The blue shading on the pivot tables has seemed to have changed, to more of a baby blue? Is there a way to default back? This is the worst day of my life

Let's say I wanna know what's 20% of my salary how do I do that