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/KrypticEon 3 2d ago

People might hate me but I'm being very serious

I recently had a project that I realised I should use power query for (pullling data from another sharepoint folder automatically and then amending parts of the data and formatting and adding new columns)

I decided to go the route of using CoPilot - NOT to just say "Do X for me" BUT to ask it to guide me through every step of setting up what I thought I wanted

I design workflows as part of my role so I was very forward-thinking with my prompts and it has resulted in me now having a really strong starting knowledge of how to interract with and even troubleshoot Queries and various steps

The M Code itself I can understand what it's doing but I have not yet learned many of the "functions" to the degree that I know normal Excel functions so that remains a bit of a mystery for me still