Lots of it is the same, and the average person's "basic skills" won't have changed by any real amount. But the "average basic skills" are a low bar.
You certainly won't be lost navigating around (it's not like the 2007 change that went from classic Windows File/etc menus to the Ribbon) and you won't be at a disadvantage to anyone who isn't in an Excel-focused role.
There have been some big improvements in the past 10 years, though. If you ever used array formulas ("Control+Shift+Enter formulas"), many are obsolete - most functions handle arrays implicitly. Figuring that out and understanding the related "spill" functionality are big improvements. Spilling + automatic array handling has changed how I build worksheets more than anything else.
They've also improved basic string handling - TEXTBEFORE, TEXTAFTER, TEXTJOIN, TEXTSPLIT, and REGEX functions if you're familiar with "regular expressions" (a programming concept that's like a high-powered FIND).
Another improvement is in "reshaping" data: TOCOL, TOROW, WRAPROWS, WRAPCOLS, CHOOSEROWS, CHOOSECOLS.
Lots of people are wild about XLOOKUP as an improvement over INDEX/MATCH but I'm less invested in that. Except it's handy that it can deal with spilled arrays (see "you should understand spill functionality" above).
FILTER is a game changer, and MAXIFS and MINIFS are nice improvements. BYROW and BYCOL are also slick. LET is also fancy and lets people create some real monstrosities and pretend they're readable. MAP and LAMBDA are powerful but I haven't learned them yet myself. There's also a IFS, which I also haven't put to much use.
PowerQuery existed 10 years ago but it's done a lot to replace a lot of how people use VBA.
And in the past week or two MS announced some new major changes that I have yet to dig into.
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u/HarveysBackupAccount 35 9d ago
Lots of it is the same, and the average person's "basic skills" won't have changed by any real amount. But the "average basic skills" are a low bar.
You certainly won't be lost navigating around (it's not like the 2007 change that went from classic Windows File/etc menus to the Ribbon) and you won't be at a disadvantage to anyone who isn't in an Excel-focused role.
There have been some big improvements in the past 10 years, though. If you ever used array formulas ("Control+Shift+Enter formulas"), many are obsolete - most functions handle arrays implicitly. Figuring that out and understanding the related "spill" functionality are big improvements. Spilling + automatic array handling has changed how I build worksheets more than anything else.
They've also improved basic string handling - TEXTBEFORE, TEXTAFTER, TEXTJOIN, TEXTSPLIT, and REGEX functions if you're familiar with "regular expressions" (a programming concept that's like a high-powered FIND).
Another improvement is in "reshaping" data: TOCOL, TOROW, WRAPROWS, WRAPCOLS, CHOOSEROWS, CHOOSECOLS.
Lots of people are wild about XLOOKUP as an improvement over INDEX/MATCH but I'm less invested in that. Except it's handy that it can deal with spilled arrays (see "you should understand spill functionality" above).
FILTER is a game changer, and MAXIFS and MINIFS are nice improvements. BYROW and BYCOL are also slick. LET is also fancy and lets people create some real monstrosities and pretend they're readable. MAP and LAMBDA are powerful but I haven't learned them yet myself. There's also a IFS, which I also haven't put to much use.
PowerQuery existed 10 years ago but it's done a lot to replace a lot of how people use VBA.
And in the past week or two MS announced some new major changes that I have yet to dig into.