The series
Long-form pieces on Excel, written to be read slowly and understood once — from taming a messy export to formulas that think for you.
The macro recorder turns a fiddly manual routine into a button — how to record one properly, read what it wrote, and the honest map of what belongs...
The workbook is good now — its home probably isn't. The three places a Microsoft 365 file can live, what each is for, and the placement rules that ...
The final power-user skill is knowing the tool's edges — the honest signals that a job has outgrown the spreadsheet, and where each kind of job goe...
The salary is a headline; the hourly rate is the truth — a small Excel model that reprices your commute, your overtime and every "is it worth it?" ...
Three chart types beyond the basic four that earn their keep — what each one is actually for, and the honesty rules that keep them from becoming de...
Fifty-fifty feels fair and often isn't — the small Excel model that shows what equal, proportional and pooled splitting each really mean for both p...
Biggest five, worst three, top 10% — the small function family for answering rank questions, and the modern spill idiom that keeps the answers live.
Why 9:00 to 17:30 is 0.354, why summed hours wrap around at 24, and the three habits that make every timesheet calculation behave.
Every workbook outlives its author's attention — the documentation habits, naming and structure that let a stranger open your file and run it witho...
Before the formulas, one idea — a sheet is not paper, and the habits that treat it like paper are where most spreadsheet pain begins.
The little green square in the corner of every selection is how one formula becomes a thousand — and how dates, series and patterns write themselves.
Software engineers test their code; spreadsheets can too — the small block of formulas that audits your workbook continuously, and screams before y...
Two built-in tools that take a jammed-together column apart — one by rules, one by imitation — and the honest guide to when each belongs.
The average that respects size — why AVERAGE lies about blended rates, and the one function that multiplies-then-adds its way to the true answer.
Five functions carry half of all spreadsheet work — and three quiet behaviours of theirs explain most of the wrong answers beginners meet.
The UK's strangest financial product behaves like a debt for some and a tax for most — one Excel model that tells you which yours is, and why it ch...
Inside a proper Table, formulas stop saying B2:B500 and start saying what they mean — the column-name grammar that makes sheets self-documenting.
A chart in a cell — the word-sized graphic that gives every row of a table its own trend line, and the three settings that make them honest.
The models built one question at a time — runway, debts, pension, ISA — finally assembled into one flowchart: where the next £100 should go, and why.
Goal Seek's heavyweight sibling — many dials, real constraints, and a best answer instead of just an answer. What it's for, and the modelling habit...
Why sheets grind — the four real causes of Excel slowness, the ten-minute diagnosis, and the habits that keep big workbooks feeling small.
Car insurance, Christmas, the MOT — annual costs aren't surprises, they're bad rhythm. One small Excel table smooths them into a single monthly num...
Lock the machinery, free the inputs — the protection layers that stop accidental damage, and an honest word about what they don't stop.
Why totals are 1p off, why 0.1+0.2 isn't quite 0.3, and the small set of rounding rules that make money maths add up — to the penny, every time.
The most emotional question in personal finance, cooled down to unrecoverable costs — a two-column Excel model that compares like with like, at last.
Insurance, energy, broadband — loyalty is billed, not rewarded. The one-hour-a-year spreadsheet routine that prices every renewal like a new customer.
Remove Duplicates deletes rows it never shows you — the counting-first routine that finds duplicates, understands them, and only then removes them.
The report is right; now it has to survive paper — print areas, scaling, repeated headers and the five settings that end the 47-page disaster.
The recipe's three power moves — unstacking cross-tabs into proper data, joining tables without lookups, and stacking sources into one — each impos...
The engine hiding inside Excel since 2010 — real table relationships, tens of millions of rows, and measures that outgrow SUMIFS, without leaving t...
Desktop built the report; the Service is where it becomes a product — publishing, scheduled refresh, sharing done right, and the licensing small pr...
The monthly report's last manual step is saving the email attachment — a no-code flow that catches it automatically, and an honest map of where to ...
Percent of total, running totals, difference from last month — the right-click menu that turns a pivot of raw sums into a pivot of insight, no form...
Percent of, percent change, percentage points — the three calculations everyone mixes up, done once, properly, with the formulas that keep them str...
Tax bands, National Insurance, pension relief — one small spreadsheet that explains every line of a UK payslip, and finally answers why the raise f...
Inside one file, architecture still matters — the sheet-per-job rule, tab hygiene, linking between sheets, and the workbook shapes that age well.
VBA doesn't run on the web — Office Scripts is what does. The recorder, the honest comparison with macros, and the schedule button that changes eve...
Why 0.1 can display as 10%, £0.10 or 12:24am — and why understanding the difference between a value and its outfit prevents years of confusion.
Every account, debt and pot on one page, totalled quarterly — the single number that shows whether the whole financial machine is actually working.
The difference between =C2*$E$1 and =C2*vat_rate is the difference between a puzzle and a sentence — naming, the cheapest quality upgrade in Excel.
Product AND month, name AND site — the three honest ways to look up on more than one condition, and which to use when.
The shared tracker that outgrew its workbook has a natural next home — what Lists is, what it fixes that Excel can't, and the honest map of what yo...
The lookup is fine — the keys are lying. A field guide to joining two tables that spell the same thing differently, from TRIM to fuzzy matching.
Every loan is the same machine — one small Excel table shows where each payment really goes, what the loan truly costs, and what overpaying actuall...
The £10,000 that becomes £7,400 without moving — real versus nominal in Excel, and the one habit that makes every money model tell the truth.
Error values are Excel telling you the truth — the field guide to what each one means, and how to handle them without gagging the messenger.
Averages hide more than they tell — how to see a column's full distribution, why the shape changes decisions, and the three ways Excel draws it.
The pivot answered the question — now make it readable. Date grouping, number banding, slicers, and the layout settings everyone hunts for.
The newest big idea in Excel — whole summary tables from a single spilling formula, no refresh button, no pivot cache, live like everything else.
Every model answers one direction — given these inputs, what result? Goal Seek answers the question you actually have: what input gets the result I...
The upstream fix for messy spreadsheets — collect with Microsoft Forms instead of circulating a workbook, and every response lands as a clean Table...
Excel will extend any line into the future with total confidence — how to make a defensible forecast, show its uncertainty, and know when not to.
Ctrl+F is the tip of something bigger — wildcards, format hunting, workbook-wide sweeps, and the replace jobs that fix a thousand cells in one click.
Standing charges, unit rates, estimated readings — the small model that turns kWh into pounds, prices any tariff against your real usage, and spots...
One input, twenty values, one grid of answers — the what-if tool that turns "it depends" into a table you can point at.
Behind Ctrl+1 sits a tiny language for dressing values — four sections, a handful of symbols, and displays that do work without touching a single n...
The plainest file format in computing, and everything Excel silently does to it on the way in — leading zeros, mangled symbols, date massacres, and...
This month's export versus last month's — the three-question routine that turns every list-comparison job into ten minutes of formulas.
Someone else's workbook, a number that looks wrong, a meeting in an hour — the built-in tools that let you read any sheet's plumbing without guessing.
The lookup mode everyone is warned off is also the right tool for a whole family of problems — grades, commission tiers, postage bands, tax brackets.
The sticker price is the smallest lie in motoring — a one-sheet model that turns any car decision into pounds per month, comparable at a glance.
Half of your "data" is text that needs taking apart — names, codes, addresses. Modern Excel finally made it read like what you mean.
The most-used feature in Excel is also the one that quietly scrambles spreadsheets — the one disaster to understand, and the habits that make it im...
You already know more Power BI than you think — what transfers from Excel, what's genuinely new, and an honest first project that takes an afternoon.
Behind ordinary paste hides the most useful dialog in Excel — freezing formulas into values, flipping rows to columns, and fixing data by arithmetic.
The £200-a-month question everyone argues about, settled the only way it can be — two columns in Excel and an honest look at what "guaranteed" is w...
The two functions that turned Excel formulas from one-liners into legible, reusable logic — name your steps, then name the whole recipe.
Not two hundred shortcuts — the dozen keystrokes that remove the mouse from the work you do ten thousand times, learned one habit at a time.
XLOOKUP is still the one to learn first — but INDEX and MATCH is the pair you'll inherit, and the mental model that makes every lookup make sense.
Co-authoring killed the email attachment — an honest guide to what browser Excel does brilliantly, what it can't do, and the sharing habits that ke...
Not "three to six months' salary" — a two-formula Excel model that tells you how long your life could run with the income switched off.
The difference between a dashboard and a decorated spreadsheet is architecture — three layers, five components, and the discipline of a single screen.
The end of copy-paste consolidation — point Excel at a folder, record the clean-up once, and refresh forever.
Turn the vaguest question in personal finance into one date on one chart — a small Excel model that shows when work becomes optional.
One formula, many answers. The spill idea behind modern Excel, and the three functions that replace copy-down for whole reports.
A chart is a sentence about your data. How to pick the right one, strip the clutter, and avoid the axis tricks that make honest numbers lie.
The feature everyone uses to paint their sheets — and the small set of rules that make it point at what actually matters instead.
Conditions are where formulas start to think — and where formulas start to sprawl. The habits that keep decision logic readable.
TODAY, EOMONTH and NETWORKDAYS — how dates really work under the hood, and the small set of functions that answer every deadline question.
The five-minute set of moves — freeze panes, split view and keyboard jumps — that make a ten-thousand-row sheet feel small.
A calm, repeatable routine for the file that lands in your inbox at the worst possible moment — trailing spaces, text-numbers, mangled dates and all.
An honest working guide to AI inside the spreadsheet — the jobs worth delegating, the ones you shouldn't, and the habit that makes it safe.
Forget the folklore around VLOOKUP — modern Excel has one lookup function that's easier to learn, harder to break, and built for real work.
The three questions every list gets asked — how many, how much, on average — and the one formula pattern that answers all of them.
Build the chart that changes behaviour — your contributions versus what compounding adds on top — with one small table and three formulas.
Not a 40-category template — a four-number budget you'll still be filling in next February, built with Tables and one SUMIFS.
The most feared feature in Excel is a drag-and-drop version of a question you already know how to ask. Here's the mental model that makes it click.
Data validation is how a spreadsheet defends itself — build proper drop-downs, cascade them, and stop the typo problem at the door.
One keyboard shortcut turns a fragile block of cells into a structure that sorts safely, feeds formulas by name, and grows by itself.
Relative and absolute references are the first real idea in Excel — understand them once and copy-down stops being a gamble.
Nothing here yet — this stage is next on the writing desk.