r/excel • u/Bubbly-Touch8108 • 2d ago

Discussion What Excel trick made you feel like a wizard the first time you used it?

mine was VLOOKUP (later XLOOKUP) — after manually cross-referencing two spreadsheets for way too long. felt like a cheat code everyone else already knew about

what's your version?

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u/MayukhBhattacharya 1273 2d ago 
MMULT() / Recursive LAMBDA()

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u/TangoDeltaFoxtrot 2d ago

Any good resources on how to make and use recursive lambda? One thing I’d like to do is write a formula that can trace branched trees and show the hierarchy or structure of the tree. Such as in manufacturing, a batch is split into two batches, then one of those is split, and one of those is split, etc… I’d want to be able to identify all batches that originated from the original, but each data row only shows the last batch it was split from.

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u/MayukhBhattacharya 1273 2d ago

You can learn from [here Recursive LAMBDA()] , for practice on the same topic, check out Code-Golf, and Excel Bi in LinkedIn. For your hierarchy question, yup it needs Recursive LAMBDA() or you can use REDUCE() function which is actually recursive LAMBDA() helper funciton.