Excel University Blog
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For accountants who rely on Excel daily, knowing when to use XLOOKUP versus VLOOKUP can save hours of rework and eliminate costly lookup errors. The short answer: XLOOKUP is the more powerful, flexible replacement for VLOOKUP in nearly every accounting scenario — but understanding why helps you use both tools with confidence. Here’s a practical…
Complex nested formulas can be intimidating. We have all opened a workbook and stared at a formula bar full of nested IFs, VLOOKUPs, and IFERRORs and had absolutely no idea what was going on. That is exactly the kind of situation where Copilot in Excel shines. In this tutorial, we walk through three exercises that…
Excel automation for accountants isn’t a luxury — it’s a competitive necessity. The accountants who close the books fastest, produce the most reliable reports, and spend the least time on repetitive tasks are the ones who’ve learned to let Excel do the heavy lifting. Whether you’re reconciling accounts, consolidating data from multiple sources, or building…
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…
Mapping credit card charges to GL accounts is one of those month-end tasks that is tedious enough once, and exponentially more painful every month after that. Raw credit card descriptions are cryptic, the volume is high, and the manual effort adds up fast. In this tutorial, we walk through three exercises that show how to…
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…
Pivot tables are great, but they do not always produce the exact report layout that corporate requires. When the format is locked in and a pivot table simply will not fit, we turn to formulas. In this tutorial, we walk through three exercises that show how to use the SUMIFS function to build formula-based reports…