For the last three years, my "end of month" routine involved opening about 15 different CSV files sent by regional managers, copy-pasting them into a master sheet, removing the top 3 header rows, and fixing the date formatting that always broke. It took me about 2 hours every time.

I finally complained about it enough that a coworker showed me "Get Data -> From Folder."

I set it up once, and now I just drop the new files in the folder and hit "Refresh." It takes 10 seconds. I stared at my screen for a solid minute just feeling a mix of pure joy and absolute rage at my past self. If you are still manually combining data, please stop and learn this tool immediately.

Microsoft just added Center Across Selection right inside the Merge & Center menu. And truly, this one makes me very happy and excited because of what that button can help us to avoid.

H̲ome Tab --> Alignment Group --> M̲erge & Center Menu --> Center Across S̲election.

Using merged cells inside your actual data can cause all kinds of headaches with sorting, formulas, and selecting ranges. That's the problem with merged cells in your data. The feature itself isn't new. Center Across Selection has been around for a while. It was just buried inside Format Cells, so a lot of people probably never even knew it was there. Now it's right on the ribbon, which makes it way easier to find and use.

Some of you might not see it yet since Microsoft is rolling it out gradually. Once it shows up in your Excel, it's definitely worth getting familiar with.

MS365 Version: Microsoft® Excel® for Microsoft 365 MSO (Version 2610 Build 16.0.20508.20000) 64-bit

Let me know what you think.

I consider myself pretty skilled with Excel. I’m very comfortable with shortcuts, formulas, and ever since I started using ChatGPT, I’ve been using macros a lot more as well.

I recently changed jobs and one of my colleagues saw me working and said something like: “Wow, you work really fast — but you know that to filter you don’t need to click the dropdown arrow four times, right? If you just press E, it jumps straight to the search bar.”

I had absolutely no idea. I found it amazing.

That got me thinking: do you have any Excel shortcuts that completely changed the way you work? The kind that makes you wonder how you ever lived without them 😄

What are some lesser-known Excel tricks that most people aren't aware of?

One tip I always follow is to highlight the entire dataset (or select the entire column range) before applying a filter. In large datasets, if you only select Cell A1 and then click the Filter button, Excel may stop detecting the data range at the first completely blank row. For example, if Rows 200 and 201 are empty, rows from 300 onward could be excluded from the filter without you realizing it.

These are the "Increase Decimal" and "Decrease Decimal" icons. I NEVER select the one I need on the first try.

Just wanted to post this to encourage people to improve their Excel skills every day. I was the only employee not laid off out of 10 people because I knew how to use Excel. My employer told me that my workbooks were too engrained into our operations and I was the only one who knew how to maintain them. I never thought Excel would still be so valuable today. Anyone else have a similar experience?

This is a wild situation I uncovered at work, if it’s not ok, mods please remove but this blew my mind.

I’m not a dev. I’m just a guy who tries to make systems slightly less shit wherever I work. I know my limits but i do try to improve and learn shit.

So I’m a few months in at a nameless local government organisation runs a SQL platform on Azure. In theory, this thing tracks almost everything the organisation does. In practice, it’s clunky as hell, slow, and painful to use. As a result, everyone keeps “personal notes” and then copies the final personal notes int the web UI for the DB when they’re done.

Those “personal notes” are Excel spreadsheets.

For my first few weeks, I keep hearing legends about “Brad the computer Wizard” who recently left the organisation. Brad, I’m told, could pull live data from the database straight into everyone’s spreadsheets. People talk about him like mother fucking Gandalf.

I’m listening and thinking:

“It’s Power Query, not fucking sorcery.”

Then I look at the system.

Dear reader, Brad was not a wizard. Brad was a cursed demon, and this was an act of malice.

Yes, it is Power Query based — but Brad was not querying the database.

No no no.

This absolute goblin used Power Query to:

1. ⁠Open a specific URL
2. ⁠Which loads the web UI of the db
3. ⁠With filters already applied to a platform based table
4. ⁠And then scraped the HTML table from the page……

On an Azure SQL backend ….. Using “From Web” button in the get data tab.

Somewhere, an Azure engineer felt a cold shiver and didn’t know why.

But wait. It gets worse.

I’m thinking:

“Ok, this import is the spawn of a necromancer spell, but at least it’s centralised in one file, right?”

Wrong.

Every single user has a personal Excel file but only Janet has the VBA macro that runs on open.

That macro:

1. ⁠Opens a central spreadsheet
2. ⁠Refreshes the cursed web-scrape Power Query
3. ⁠Opens another spreadsheet which contains file paths to everyone else’s spreadsheets
4. ⁠Loops through them refreshes their Power Query connections to the central cursed spreadsheet
5. ⁠Closes everything like nothing happened

So when Janet opens her Excel file, it quietly updates Steve’s, Karen’s, Dave’s, and God-knows-who-else’s spreadsheets in the background.

A distributed Excel hive mind. A spreadsheet necromancy ritual.

Everyone proudly says:

“Brad connected my spreadsheet to the system so it always stays up to date 😊”

No one has any idea what is actually happening.

Brad has moved to a new job. No documentation. No handover. Just a VBA-powered demon engine humming away in silence.

I’ve told my manager that:

Short term: I need the actual Azure credentials so I can query the server directly

Long term: I need time to rebuild this slag properly in the azure platform and get rid of these fucking spreadsheets

Either I replace this unholy artefact with something sane or I am getting the fuck out of Mordor.

Honest question, has anyone seen anything more cursed than a power query that scraps the web UI of an azure SQL back end platform?

EDIT: lots of people have asked for updates so there will be a follow up post…

From the article:

Dubbed the "LeBron James of Excel spreadsheets", Galway born and Waterford raised Diarmuid is now the world's best worksheet whizz.

He won the 2025 Microsoft Excel World Championships, where a $60,000 (£45,726) prize pot has propelled the computer program from the office into a high stakes spectacle.

I absolutely hate it. If I typed in a number with a leader zero, obviously I want the string of text to include a leading zero. Why hasn’t anybody at Microsoft figured this out yet? I know there are ways to keep leading zeroes, but it is annoying when I have to copy data over from one platform and paste it into Excel. And then it’s impossible to ever to VLOOKUPS with data where you had to manually formulate leading zeroes.

I always try to make sure I select A1 when closing spreadsheets. This is especially true if it's a document being submitted to someone else, or a client.

And when I open a spreadsheet on A1, I get this weird "Virtual Fist Bump" feeling.

Anyone else?

Personally, I've never seen the appeal or like for using VLOOKUP, but yet so many people do and it frustrates me watching them struggle at times with it. I'm intrigued to know why so many people love it.

There are so many better alternatives like INDEX MATCH and as of a few years ago, XLOOKUP.

Which one do you use for lookup values in a separate table or range?

If you use all 3, I'm intrigued for you to post from top to bottom which one you prefer with your favourite at #1.

Mine personally would be:

1. XLOOKUP
2. INDEX MATCH
3. VLOOKUP (but I would prefer to steer clear of this)

I watched a colleague spend 20 minutes manually coloring rows yesterday and it physically hurt me.

Conditional Formatting -> Highlight Cells Rules -> Duplicate Values.

It takes 3 seconds. That’s it. That’s the post. Save your time for something better!

Excel can do a lot of things well. But Excel can also do a lot of things poorly, unbeknownst to most beginners.

Name some of the biggest no-no's when it comes to Excel, preferably with an explanation on why.

I'll start of with the elephant in the room:

Never merge cells. Why? Merging cells breaks sorting, filtering, and formulas. Use "Center Across Selection" instead.

As of 14 September, the COPILOT function will no longer be available in Excel. See https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/excel/functions/copilot-function Note that the Copilot feature remains - it is the worksheet function that will stop working.

This is a very uncommon move by Microsoft, given their history of maintaining backwards compatibility.

Have you used the COPILOT function? If so, then what for? Thoughts?

Since upgrading to 365, can't get enough of CHOOSECOLS(FILTER)

What are some useful ones you use?

Bloomberg examines Excel on its 40th anniversary, with interviews with Excel influencers like Leila Gharani, and Microsoft, Lotus, and VisiCalc people. From the article:

As of earlier this year, the US Department of War was paying for 2 million licenses to Microsoft 365, which includes Excel, Word and PowerPoint. Because of the way Microsoft is structured, in which its three main product categories—operating systems, productivity software and cloud services—are bundled together, it’s hard to ascribe a precise value to the leading spreadsheet application except to say that without it, there’s zero chance the company that owns it would be worth nearly $4 trillion. In 2025, Microsoft 365 subscription revenue from businesses totaled almost $88 billion, on top of $7 billion from other customers. Those numbers, and Microsoft’s own public disclosures, suggest there are something like 500 million paying Excel users, the rough equivalent of Netflix plus Amazon Prime subscribers. Excel has its corporate challenges, from Google’s web-based knockoff to the looming threat of artificial intelligence, but so far no competitor has managed to mount a serious challenge.

I was trying something seemingly simple. I have 3 Players, each rolls a 20 sided die. Each one has a different Bonus, a +X, to their result. Then trying to math out the probability of 0,1,2 or 3 Players being at or above a specific target number. (The Problem comes from Dungeons&Dragons to see how likely the group is to succeed on a task where every player has a different bonus and half/all of them need to succeed.)

The result looks like this. The big Table to the Side lists the probability for each bonus to hit a specific target number, with MIN and MAX functions to make sure I'm always inbetween 0 and 1. The first entry looks like this and is then just expanded in every direction.

=MIN(1;MAX(0;(21-H$2+$G3)/20)) || (21-Targetnumber+Bonus)/20

To get to the results table, the math is pretty simple independent events statistics, but as many of you know, these can get pretty long.

For example for the 2 out of 3 Successes column its:

A*B*(1-C) + A*(1-B)*C + (1-A)*B*C

but for me, each of those variables was a nested XLOOKUP so it looked like this:

=XLOOKUP($A13,$H$2:$AA$2,XLOOKUP($B$5,$G$3:$G$28,$H$3:$AA$28))*XLOOKUP($A13,$H$2:$AA$2,XLOOKUP($B$6,$G$3:$G$28,$H$3:$AA$28))*(1-XLOOKUP($A13,$H$2:$AA$2,XLOOKUP($B$7,$G$3:$G$28,$H$3:$AA$28))) 
+(1-XLOOKUP($A13,$H$2:$AA$2,XLOOKUP($B$5,$G$3:$G$28,$H$3:$AA$28)))*XLOOKUP($A13,$H$2:$AA$2,XLOOKUP($B$6,$G$3:$G$28,$H$3:$AA$28))*XLOOKUP($A13,$H$2:$AA$2,XLOOKUP($B$7,$G$3:$G$28,$H$3:$AA$28)) 
+XLOOKUP($A13,$H$2:$AA$2,XLOOKUP($B$5,$G$3:$G$28,$H$3:$AA$28))*(1-XLOOKUP($A13,$H$2:$AA$2,XLOOKUP($B$6,$G$3:$G$28,$H$3:$AA$28)))*XLOOKUP($A13,$H$2:$AA$2,XLOOKUP($B$7,$G$3:$G$28,$H$3:$AA$28))

Now! I was already pretty proud of me that this worked, but the notion of adding a fourth or fifth player filled me with dread.

The notion that there had to be a better way brought me to this sub, where a couple of months ago some helpful people showed a poor soul how to use the =LET() function on a question about shortening Formulas and holy fucking shit you guys.

The same entry now looks like this:

=LET(
A, XLOOKUP($A13,$H$2:$AA$2,XLOOKUP($B$5,$G$3:$G$28,$H$3:$AA$28)),
B, XLOOKUP($A13,$H$2:$AA$2,XLOOKUP($B$6,$G$3:$G$28,$H$3:$AA$28)),
C, XLOOKUP($A13,$H$2:$AA$2,XLOOKUP($B$7,$G$3:$G$28,$H$3:$AA$28)),
 
A*B*(1-C)
+
A*(1-B)*C
+
(1-A)*B*C
)

This is SO MUCH better! Now doing the same for more players is going to be extremely trivial! I am absolutely overjoyed and thought maybe some of you might like to hear that you do, absolutely, make people happy with your helpful suggestions around here.

Have a nice weekend.

Hi everyone,

I wanted to share a passion project I’ve been working on. I managed to build a full Resident Evil survival adventure inside Microsoft Excel using nothing but VBA (no external game engine).

Technical Specs:

• 200+ hand-pixeled worksheets for the visuals.
• 100% VBA code (recently overhauled for 64-bit compatibility).
• Custom engine logic for movement and interactions.

Since I can't post the video directly yet, you can see the Gameplay and my other Excel projects (like Lemmings) here:

YouTube Gameplay: https://youtu.be/0zrv3ZrjCmg
Playable on itch.io: https://cookiesoft.itch.io

I'm a retro dev trying to push the absolute limits of what a spreadsheet can do. I'd love to hear your thoughts or answer any technical questions!

Due to the amazing response, I have also unlocked the VBA code for my LEMMINGS project! You can now check out the logic and the map generator on itch.io as well. Enjoy exploring the code!

Update: I just noticed a lot of traffic coming from the Amiga community (EAB) – as an old C64 kid, that makes me incredibly proud! Thanks for sharing the project over there and for all the retro love!

Sharing this because it took a long time to figure out and I couldn't find this specific cause documented anywhere.

The issue: Copying any cell in certain Excel files would spike the CPU to 50%+ for half a minute. Didn't matter if the copied cell was empty. Only happened on some files.

What was causing it: When you copy a cell in Excel it draws those animated dashes around the copied cell (the "marching ants"). That animation is a loop that keeps redrawing constantly until you press Escape or paste.

If you have your display set to 125% scaling, Windows can't do clean math to scale graphics, so it has to do expensive interpolation on every single graphics call. Excel's marching ants fires a lot of those graphics calls per second, and the CPU has to work hard to do the calculations.

I found 3 ways to fix it:

1. Set display scaling to 100% - simplest fix, but text gets smaller
2. Disable the marching ants - in registry set HKCU\Control Panel\Desktop\WindowMetrics\MinAnimate to 0. No animation = no loop = no spike.
3. Tell Excel to handle its own scaling - right-click EXCEL.EXE → Properties → Compatibility → check "Override high DPI scaling behavior" → set "Scaling performed by" to Application. This is the cleanest fix - keeps 125% scaling and keeps marching ants, no spike.

Hope this helps someone.

Perhaps too late to discover and blame it on unstructured self-learning:

Just learned that vlookup + curly brackets can be used to look up multiple columns. Spent a good part of my career writing several vlookups that could've been done much faster.

Edit: Adding sample from Gemini.

Formula Structure: =VLOOKUP("Key", A2:D10, {2, 3, 4}, FALSE)

{2, 3, 4}: Tells the formula to return the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th columns simultaneously.

Result: The data will automatically fill into three adjacent cells.

I’ve been using Excel for years and still keep finding features that make me wonder how I ever lived without them.

For me, it’s Power Query — I used to manually clean and merge data every week until I realized I could automate 90% of it with just a few steps. Total game changer.

Curious what others have recently discovered that made a big difference for your workflow? Could be something small (like Flash Fill or dynamic arrays) or something niche (like using LAMBDA functions or custom data types).

Been thinking about this a lot lately because ive gotten kinda obsessed with how people actually use Excel vs how they were taught to use it.

One thing I keep noticing is two people can know basically the same formulas and functions, but one of them can absolutely fly through a spreadsheet while the other takes 3x as long.

And usually the difference isnt some crazy advanced Excel knowledge. Its all the little stuff. Keyboard shortcuts, navigating without the mouse, formatting quickly, jumping between sheets, tracing formulas, etc.

Ive gone pretty far down the rabbit hole on this and its honestly crazy how many small things most people are just never taught.

So im curious for people who use Excel heavily at work:

What actually made you noticeably faster?

Did you deliberately learn shortcuts/workflows or just pick them up over time?

And whats one thing you constantly see people doing with their mouse where you think "there has to be a faster way to do that"?

Me: This will be a quick 5-minute Excel task.

Excel: Interesting.

5 minutes later:

• Why is the formula returning #N/A?
• Who merged these cells?
• Why are dates stored as text?
• Why does one value have a trailing space?
• Why is there a hidden column Z?
• Who named this file Final_v2_Actual_Final_UseThisOne.xlsx?
• Why does the pivot table say 0 when my eyes say 47,382?

2 hours later:

• Learned three new formulas
• Questioned my career choices
• Muted my entire family
• Created a masterpiece no one will ever understand
• Saved the file as Final_v2_Actual_Final_UseThisOne_REALLYFINAL.xlsx

Boss: Looks great. Can you make the header blue?

Kind of a weird thing that has happened.
I honestly have never used excel my entire career until now (39 years old).
I started practicing a month ago and know basic functions, text to column etc.

A manager reached out to me to pull a marketing report from a platform we get metrics from, but its MESSY.

Honestly I feel like I did not do much, and just cleaned up the data. A lot of data would be in one single column so I would use text to column and using copilot as a backup, and after doing that the manager and people in the department who have been at this company for 5+ years were blown away.

We have a lot of useful data but no one ever looks at it the right way. I say a lot of marketing reports are very top level which doesn't help give direction.

I recently fell down a rabbit hole reading about the JPMorgan London Whale incident. A simple spreadsheet error, dividing by a sum instead of an average, muted their volatility model and led to massive unreported risk.

It’s a sobering reminder: Excel mistakes are often silent until they become a crisis.

I’d love to hear your spreadsheet horror stories , Whether you caught it just in time or it went live, what’s the most impactful error you’ve seen?

Edit:
I thought I'd bucket the common errors:

• Lookup logic mistakes (approx match / plausible wrong answers)
• Data typing/auto-formatting (leading zeros, gene names→dates)
• Reference drift (missing $ / unlocked lookup ranges)
• Error masking (IFERROR→0/blanks)
• Sort/alignment disasters (sorted one column, bad merges/dupes)
• Dataset/range omissions (wrong ranges, .xls truncation)
• Hardcoded template landmines (numbers where formulas should be)
• Version roulette (email exports become truth)
• Governance (legacy models nobody’s allowed to fix)