Excel University Blog
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PivotTable
Most PivotTable reports stop at the sum. But Excel’s PivotTable engine has a whole layer of built-in calculations that most people never touch. In this tutorial, we work through three exercises that show how to display values as percentages of the grand total, percentages of a parent group, and running year-to-date totals, all without writing…
Wide data with multiple amount columns might look like a report, but it fights analysis every step of the way. Power Query’s Unpivot Columns command fixes that by collapsing those side-by-side month columns into a single, clean Amount column. The result is a tidy tabular structure that PivotTables, charts, and formulas all love. In this…
One of the most powerful things we can do with Copilot in Excel is teach it our preferences once and have it follow them every time. Rather than spelling out formatting rules in every single prompt, we can set up standing personalization instructions that Copilot applies automatically. In this tutorial, we cover two approaches: global…
For CPAs and accounting professionals, Excel isn’t just a spreadsheet tool — it’s the engine behind financial reporting, month-end close, audit workpapers, and budget models. Mastering Excel directly improves the speed and accuracy of your work. And when that mastery comes through structured, qualifying coursework, it also satisfies your CPE requirements. Excel for CPAs CPE…
Month-end reporting often means the same tasks, repeated every single month. We pull data from a CSV, clean it up, build a summary, and maybe add a chart. If we are doing all of that manually, we are leaving a lot of time on the table. In this tutorial, we cover a three-exercise workflow that…
What if every new journal entry posted in QuickBooks Online landed in an Excel table automatically, no copy-paste required? In this tutorial we walk through exactly that workflow. We use Zapier to connect QuickBooks Online to an Excel workbook stored in OneDrive, loop through each journal entry line so it lands on its own row,…
In this post, we’ll walk through the game-changing workflow of using the Claude add-in for Excel to quickly generate first drafts for complex reports. Whether you need summarized spending, budget vs. actual analyses, or executive-ready management dashboards, the Claude add-in accelerates data transformation while leaving us firmly in control of accuracy and customization. Video What…
Microsoft has just introduced one of the most impactful updates to PivotTables in recent memory: Auto Refresh. If you’ve ever relied heavily on PivotTables for financial reports, dashboards, or data summaries, this new feature is a game changer. In this guide, we’ll walk step-by-step through how to enable and use PivotTable auto refresh in Excel,…
When working with messy data, we often turn to Excel, but with the rise of AI tools like ChatGPT, we now have new ways to tackle these challenges. In this post, we’ll compare Excel and ChatGPT side by side, using three common data tasks: We’ll see how each tool handles the job, the pros and…
Creating an interactive Excel dashboard doesn’t have to be complicated. With just a few steps, we can transform raw data into a dynamic, easy-to-read report that updates automatically as new data comes in. In this guide, we’ll walk through the process of building an Excel dashboard using pivot tables, pivot charts, and a timeline filter.…