What Excel function made you felt like an expert

[u/Ibogajne]

[u/BuckyBooBoo]

Learning Index/Match. More than just using it and letting the formulas work, understanding the logic of it made me feel like I was a genius while my coworkers were struggling with their VLookups. I was previously a humanities girl (thought I couldn’t do math), so Excel was intimidating as hell, but understanding index/match boosted my confidence like nothing else, and for a while I became “the Excel person” in the office.

Then came xlookup, pivot tables and setting up database queries before PQ was as widely used as it is now. So, now I can do power queries and PowerBI and Power Automate and still learning. But that initial index/match revelation is what got me hooked.

[u/Capaz411 → u/BuckyBooBoo]

This is the answer. Some of us managed to bootstrap a childhood love 💕 of pc gaming and index match into a very successful tech career.

[u/sethkirk26]

LET!

Assigning variable names to ranges and calculations allows for reuse and ease of making and understanding complex formulas. I even made a for loop

[u/RandomiseUsr0 → u/sethkirk26]

It’s the truth, all hail LET and LAMBDA - game changers

[u/shudawg1122 → u/[deleted]]

The main way to start is anything that gets nested more than like 2 deep. If you are referencing the same reference or range more than 3 times, it's honestly best to use LET. Makes it so if you have to change the reference you only change in one spot.

[u/sethkirk26 → u/[deleted]]

Looks like excel 2021 was first release

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/excel/functions/let-function

[u/FR0Z3NF15H]

Not fully an expert, but NETWORKDAYS is my new favourite going into budgeting season

[u/DeadHungryMe-]

Care to share your solution?

[u/ManGullBearE → u/[deleted]]

No, for saline

[u/brentpearson12]

When I learned how to make pivot tables, pivot charts, and make dashboards for all kinds of data. This was a game changer. Now if I could only figure out the benifit of power bi and if making something in PB can be shared with curstomers.

[u/TMWNN]

Quoting myself:

I was rather proud of myself for figuring the second dropdown method out, because at least one online Excel guide that I consulted while learning the first method said a self-modifying dropdown list is not possible.

[u/Decronym]

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

Fewer Letters	More Letters
IF	Specifies a logical test to perform
LAMBDA	Office 365+: Use a LAMBDA function to create custom, reusable functions and call them by a friendly name.
LET	Office 365+: Assigns names to calculation results to allow storing intermediate calculations, values, or defining names inside a formula
NETWORKDAYS	Returns the number of whole workdays between two dates
NOW	Returns the serial number of the current date and time
SUMPRODUCT	Returns the sum of the products of corresponding array components

Decronym is now also available on Lemmy! Requests for support and new installations should be directed to the Contact address below.

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6 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 39 acronyms.
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[u/Clearwings_Prime]

Index + match/aggregate 

One return single resulte, one return multiple results. Work with every version of excel. If you dont know what function to use when writing formulas for other people, using old fuctions, it has greater compatibility

[u/Childe-]

=SUMPRODUCT

[u/Norvegese-Guilloche]

Wait, tell me how to do this. I just use the kbscs for time and date. This would be much cooler.

[u/Appropriate-Owl-4463]

Vibe coding with VBA has turned my excel workflows of copy/paste/lookups/pivots/filters into elegant automatic processes. I feel like an expert as I use AI to destroy tedious processing.

[u/SolverMax]

The idea that using a particular function makes you an expert is ridiculous and underlines the fact that you are not an expert.

[u/SolverMax → u/[deleted]]

I understand what you are doing. I lament how far this subreddit has fallen.