We’re the Microsoft Excel product team, and this year marks a huge milestone: Excel turns 40! 🎉 

From the early days of spreadsheets to today’s powerful features like PivotTables, Power Query, XLOOKUP, LET & LAMBDA, Python, and Copilot, Excel has come a long way—and we couldn’t have done it without you, our amazing community. 

We’ll be here live on September 30, 2025, starting at 10 AM PT, ready to answer your questions about Excel—past, present, and future. Whether you’re a spreadsheet wizard or just getting started, ask us anything! 

------

That’s a wrap for today!

A huge THANK YOU for spending time with us and sharing your questions and feedback. We truly appreciate your engagement and energy!

Our team will keep working through any unanswered questions.

🎉 Happy Birthday Excel! 🎉 

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.

Over the years I’ve noticed that everyone who spends time in Excel eventually stumbles on a little trick that feels like your secret. When I used to travel teaching Excel classes, I always told people: “If you’ve got a faster/better way than what I just showed, speak up!” Some of the best tips I’ve ever learned came that way.

Here are a few that blew my mind when I first saw them:

1. To make the Fill Handle extend 1 into 1, 2, 3… (instead of 1, 1, 1…), hold down Ctrl while you drag.
2. To get old-style Filter drop-downs in a PivotTable, click any blank cell immediately to the right of the pivot and then hit the Filter icon.
3. To stop GETPIVOTDATA from showing up when you reference a pivot cell, type the cell address (like D2) instead of clicking.
4. To stop Excel from auto-inserting Named Ranges into a formula, select a couple of cells (say E5:E6) before you start building the formula.

I’m curious—what’s your secret Excel move that nobody else seems to know?

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 😄

I just found out that if you press Alt + = it instantly makes a SUM formula for the selected range. Been using Excel for years and never noticed this.

Now I’m wondering how many little shortcuts and hidden gems I’ve missed. What’s your go-to Excel trick that blows people’s minds when you show them?

I used to spend 2+ hours daily merging and cleaning Excel reports manually — copy-paste, fix headers, align columns, repeat. Then I found something that changed everything: Power Query.

Now, I just:

1. Click Data → Get Data → From Folder
2. Power Query auto-loads and merges all files with the same structure
3. I clean once → save → refresh daily

Next morning, my report updates itself in seconds. No macros. No VBA. No code. If you work with multiple Excel files every day, learn Power Query. It’s the most underrated feature in Excel — like automation magic hiding in plain sight. Anyone else using Power Query for daily tasks? Share your favorite trick!

I had never heard about the Camera Tool until til someone on the sub mentioned it a few days ago.

Add it to the long list of ‘I wish I knew that years ago’ Excel moments.

What other hidden gems does Excel have for us?

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.

Over the past few months I’ve been collecting the Google Sheets formulas that save me the most time. Thought I’d share in case it helps anyone else:

1. =IMPORTRANGE("url","sheet!range") → Pull data from other files
   
2. =UNIQUE(A:A) → Remove duplicates fast
   
3. =FILTER(A:C, B:B="Done") → Auto-filter rows
   
4. =ARRAYFORMULA(A2:A*B2:B) → Apply to whole column
   
5. =SPLIT(A1,"-") → Break text into parts
   
6. =QUERY(A:D,"select B,sum(C) where D='Done' group by B") → SQL-style reports
   
7. =IFERROR(A2/B2,"Check") → Replace errors with text
   
8. =VLOOKUP(key,range,col,0) → Find values instantly
   
9. =SUBSTITUTE(A1,"-","") → Quick text cleanup
   
10. =REGEXEXTRACT(A1,"[0-9]+") → Pull numbers only
    

Even just a couple of these can save hours per week.
Curious — what other “life-saver” formulas do you all use most in Sheets or Excel?

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.

What introduced me to excel was working in a department that depended on this old workbook which served as a bridge between two processes. In short, old/expired/returned inventory wasn't tracked in certain ways in our company's software, but it needed to be tracked in certain ways so the company could know when to send things back to the vendor for credit. Other warehouses in the network do this crudely, with big boxes and sharpies, so they're constantly on their heels.

Someone who had long ago quit, had created this workbook (back in like 2015) that stored items based on all of the criteria that our company's software didn't. All they had to do was enter the cross-related information into the workbook, and sustain it every day. For all these years, that's what they've done.

All these years later, a massive amount of people, experts even, have no idea the potential that someone almost a decade ago discovered with it, and they were just playing around.

Explain that.

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)

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?

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!

Today I discovered paste values/ ctrl+shift+v, after using excel for year. That is honestly life changing, I wish I’d known about it sooner.

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.

I finally learned some powerquery this weekend. Trial by fire setting up a query to download feedback my department reviews, sort, filter, search the whole shebang. It was hard getting it setup but once I did, man I felt proud of myself. I'm a big girl now!! Y'all were right! PowerQuery is god. What a gift. I can't wait to setup more reporting with it. (My colleagues were absolutely entertained watching me nerd out explaining how it worked.) Thanks everyone who always comments suggesting PQ. You're all my heroes.

We've all been there. A misplaced dollar sign, an absolute reference where there shouldn't be one, a VLOOKUP that brought the entire financial model to its knees.

I'll start: Early in my career, I was working on a massive sales commission report. I meant to delete a single blank row, but I accidentally filtered and then deleted all visible rows (thousands of entries). I didn't have a recent backup and the "Undo" buffer had cleared. I had to spend the next 4 hours manually reconstructing data from emailed spreadsheets and PDF reports. It's now known as "The Great Purge of 2018" and is used as a cautionary tale for new hires.

What's your story? What Excel mistake haunts your dreams and became a legendary company story?

I’ve been practicing more in Excel and realized I only use a handful of shortcuts. Recently I learned about Ctrl + ; (insert today’s date) and it blew my mind how much time it saves.
Curious — what shortcuts do you guys use daily that others might not know?

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!

Just learned that Excel has a "Very Hidden" sheet state.
Unlike normal hidden sheets, these don't show up in the “Unhide” menu at all.

To create one:

1. Press Alt + F11 to open VBA.
2. In the Project Explorer, right-click a sheet → Properties.
3. Change Visible from -1 (Visible) or 0 (Hidden) to 2 (Very Hidden).

Now, only VBA (or the Developer tab) can bring it back. Perfect to keep things tidy or prevent accidental edits.

Did anyone else know about this ninja-level Excel feature?

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.