I’ve spent over twenty years in professional IT — keeping infrastructure running, fixing things at 3am, and teaching other people how systems really work. And in every job, in every office, one truth kept reappearing: whatever the official system was, the real work happened in a spreadsheet.
Budgets, rosters, stock counts, project plans, the file that one person in accounts guards with their life — it’s Excel all the way down. Most people were never actually taught it. They inherited a workbook, learned three tricks under pressure, and have been quietly fighting their data ever since.
That’s what this site is for.
How I teach
Years in infrastructure taught me a particular way of learning things:
understand the system before you memorise the commands. Excel rewards
exactly the same approach. If you understand what a cell reference really
is, the $ sign stops being folklore. If you understand what makes a
proper table, half of your formula problems never happen at all.
So every guide here works the same way:
- The why before the how. You’ll know why the technique works, so you can adapt it when your data looks different — and it always does.
- Real, messy examples. Not tidy textbook data. Exports with trailing spaces, dates stored as text, and names in the wrong case — the stuff that actually lands in your inbox at 4:45pm.
- In order. The guides attach to the path — six stages from first spreadsheet to power user — so you always know where you are and what’s next.
What’s here now, and what’s coming
The written guides are the foundation, and new ones ship steadily — one email per guide if you subscribe. A YouTube channel is warming up alongside, teaching the same material on screen. Later, structured courses and workbook downloads will join them.
If there’s a spreadsheet problem you keep hitting, I’d genuinely like to hear about it — the best guides start as someone’s real 4:45pm export.
Say hello
The inbox is open: hello@eoinderry.com. You’ll also find me on YouTube and LinkedIn.