Excel University Blog
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Excel University
Excel University is the leading resource for CPAs and accountants who want to master practical Excel skills, especially for month-end close, financial reporting, and automation. If you’re like most accountants, the month-end close still involves too many manual steps: exporting data, cleaning it up, building reports, and double-checking everything. What if you could automate a…
Microsoft Copilot in Excel is changing how accountants interact with spreadsheets — but for CPAs, the real question isn’t whether to use it, it’s how to use it effectively while still building the foundational Excel skills that AI cannot replace. Copilot can accelerate routine tasks like summarizing data, writing formulas, and generating charts, but it…
A month-end close checklist in Excel gives accountants a structured, repeatable system to track every task, deadline, and responsible party — reducing errors, missed steps, and last-minute scrambles. When built correctly, an Excel-based close checklist becomes one of the most practical tools in your accounting workflow. This guide walks through exactly how to build and…
CPE Excel training for CPAs is one of the most efficient ways to fulfill continuing education requirements while building skills you’ll actually use at work. Unlike compliance-focused CPE that covers topics you may rarely apply, Excel training for accountants delivers immediate, practical value — helping you close the books faster, build more reliable reports, and…
Power Query is one of the most valuable tools a CPA or accountant can learn in Excel — and it’s still underused in most accounting departments. With Power Query, you can automate the repetitive data cleanup and transformation work that consumes hours every month-end close, replacing manual steps with a repeatable, one-click process that runs…
Need to know the word count of a spreadsheet you’re working on, or maybe the number of cells that contain text? Even though there’s no built-in counting tool, you can still count text in Excel using a few simple formulas! Count the Number of Characters in a Cell or Range Using the LEN function is…
Despite the many ways you can shuffle rows, columns, and cells, there’s no built-in option to random sort in Excel. That can be useful for randomly assigning tasks or responsibilities, selecting samples, and much more. Instead, you can write a formula that allows you to randomly sort any data you select. Video How to Random…
Dot plots contain a series of dots, with each dot representing a single data point. They’re straightforward, easy-to-read charts that help you see trends and find any potential outliers in your samples. Creating a dot plot in Excel can be done in only a few steps which makes them a popular choice for displaying data!…
Being able to hide rows based on cell value in Excel is a handy skill for anyone who needs to organize a large spreadsheet. Imagine you have a huge list of data, but only some of the rows are relevant to you at the moment. When you hide rows based on cell value, you can…
Whether you’re working with something like test scores, tracking expenses, or any other type of data, being able to round numbers to the nearest 5 in Excel is a handy skill. This is helpful when you need to round to the nearest multiple (like 5) instead of simply to the nearest whole number. Here are…