Interesting Things I’ve Discovered About Excel Whilst Learning It Against My Will

In this job I’ve spent a lot of time fucking around with Excel speadsheets. Ideally it would be Access, but that requires learning VBA Macros and I’m not paid enough to do that. Then again, it would solve so many of my problems (mail merge for one).

These are some interesting things I’ve picked up whilst playing around with Excel

• The LET() let’s you assign variables to computations in a cell.
• Advanced filtering is well worth learning and using over regular filtering.
• The type of your cells really matters!
• Learn Python and use openpyxl. Guess it’s the programmer in me, but I never got declarative programming. I really should learn VBA.
• XLOOKUP is great for cross referencing cells. Useful for data verification.
• Structured references can save you a lot of time.
• PowerQuery is incredible and is worth learning.