I recently signed up for Excel Insider Beta, and in its latest update it introduced Dashboards—which are essentially canvases, very similar to Power BI visuals that use HTML code but sacrifice interactivity.

Testing Results

I've been testing it, and here's what I found: it works with Copilot (the one integrated into Excel). Copilot creates a new canvas-type object that contains all the charts and buttons for the data, and it updates instantly with the data.

My Take (Beta Impressions)

Since this is still Beta, I have mixed feelings:

Pros: The visuals are eye-catching and the color combinations are attractive.

Cons: The designs are template-based, so you have to prompt the AI ​​several times to define the objects properly.

Workflow & Compatibility

It works with Power Query and Power Pivot, but the workflow is: PQ → Pivot → Pivot Table → Sheet → Canvas.

Limitations

There are interaction limitations. For example, if you want a PDF, it doesn't print directly—Copilot creates a script as if it were a browser, but it has no delimiter, so it prints like a beginner's output.

Final Thoughts

I think it will depend on how much freedom Microsoft gives (which I doubt will be much) and on Excel being optimized as a whole.

What I do hope for is a Power Query update that brings it to the same level as Power Bi.

I've gained tons of Excel knowledge this year like XLOOKUP, CONCAT,SUMIF,IFS,Pivot tables,etc....

I have practiced a lot and for some reason I feel behind still. I'm like " no way this is too easy. That's it? That's the complicated Excel stuff ppl talk about?"

I don't have a job yet, so I don't know how Excel looks like on the job.

Did I underestimate Excel?

Is it easy or is there something I'm missing?

I hope you get my point, because English isn't my first language.

There are quite the few SUM and AVG etc. formulas e.g. SUM and AVG but also SUBTOTAL and AGGREGATE and possibly more I don't know of.

I only learned about AGGREGATE a couple weeks ago and I love how it combines different functions and filter possibilities in one. SUBTOTAL does alot of it too, but I think AGGREGATE has more flexibility.

But I do use SUM still alot for the quick sums.

What formulas do you usually use?

I cried so much today and feel so stupid.

I love Excel, but unfortunately for me, none of my past jobs asked for much. I always played around by myself and felt fairly confident. Even made a Jack'O Lantern art that lights up with a drop down just yesterday haha.

I had an excel assessment coming up for a supply chain assistant position. I'm switching careers from languages (doing my Master’s in supply chain) so internships never give me a chance. I have to pass these interviews somehow. I get many but being on a dependant visa doesn't help, most places reject me despite good interviews.

This was the first time I made it to the last round. I was so excited, I even made a whole excel practice sheet, it had around 30 different exercises for every kind of scenario, all of them had around 1-3 things I needed to do. I checked the internet for possible questions and felt fairly confident.

When I went to the test, they didn't even give me a mouse. I brought one thankfully, but even that kind of made me anxious. Then she told me that my time limit was 25 mins. I was surprised, not even 30 for intermediate? For the skills they asked for, people on the internet usually said an hour at least, so I got even more nervous. She also didn't inform me that it would be on Mac, which I'm not used to, so that just added to my anxiety.

Then she gave me a big dataset and other 3-4 tabs. She told me there were some errors on all of them and gave me around 5 different tasks. One of them asked me to find the biggest differences in the data. Apparently I was supposed to use XLOOKUP and SUMIF, but I was so stuck on the "errors" that I couldn't figure it out. I could barely do anything and felt awful. It just felt like very little time.

Am I hopeless? I thought I was good enough at Excel, maybe I overestimated myself. It's just that, the assessments I saw on the internet were a lot more clean and clear. It was kind of unexpected to me.

I would appreciate any kind of advice. How do you deal with the anxiety?

Edit: I genuinely love this sub so much, it reminds me not to dislike Excel because of one bad experience. Thank you everyone for your kind responses 💕

Also forgot to add, but one of the exercises was writing the incorrect values. That threw me off cause I know how to automate fixing them, but pointing the wrong ones out isn't something I know how to do. Does anyone know what the most efficient way to do that? Especially if they're different types of mistakes (Additional space, lowercase insteaf of uppercase, additional character etc.)

I'm retired now, but at work I was known as The Excel Guy. I built so many projects for so many different things over the years. Many of the files would do a lot of the work for people, all they had to do was enter or connect the data. I built things that upper management said couldn't be done. I even showed one department how to import data from an expiring program and use Excel to convert it to the new program's format so it could be imported and save thousands of hours of work. But in 2021 they decided they no longer needed my position and when the contract was renewed I no longer had a job.

Within about a month or so I got a phone call from the manager asking how to fix something they broke. I was surprised by the phone call, he acted like he didn't know that I no longer worked there, but he obviously knew. I explained that the position was discontinued and I no longer worked for the company, but if they needed my services I charged $70 an hour (the rate I was being paid when the job ended), by the hour, with a 2 hour minimum. He said he would like to, but he couldn't do that. He said he would look into it, but needed me to help him first. I told him to call me again if he changed his mind or to stop wasting my time if he wasn't willing to pay for my service. He never called me again.

After 4 years passed they asked a friend of mine that still worked at the company to ask me about coming back, he passed the info on to me, but he already knew my answer. He later told me they were struggling to find someone who could do what I did and that they were having to develop new processes to get things done that used to be so easy.

People don't realize how good things are until you let them break it. Even then they're either too stubborn to admit your value or too dumb to value what you contribute.

I've created a heat map using one of the preset conditional formatting gradients and I need to include a key (?) like the gradient with the numbers in the top right of this image, however I can't seem to figure out how to do that...help?

I have a bunch of numbers, e.g. 46, 55, 89, 92, 95, 101, 104, 112, etc. Is there a way I can make a column graphs where each column shows the count for a specific range, e.g. a count of all the values which fall between 40-49, 50-59, and so on?

We blocked macros unless digitally signed. Someone with an xlsm workbook can no longer access the content in scrollable cells. I attempted to use the selfcert.exe utility to sign the workbook using a self signed cert but that did not help resolve this.

Has anyone come across this before and have a way to get the content in the cells out of the workbook?

I have been googling and racking my brain trying to figure out where I’ve messed up. I cannot get the XLOOKUP function to display information. I think it must be something I did with the defined names, but cannot figure it out. Any help is appreciated!

Edit: my textbook is telling me to use XLOOKUP. I will lose points/fail the assignment if I do it incorrectly.

Edit: images attached in comments

Trying to put together a formula and running into a bit of difficulty. I'm comparing a Target Date for completion of a task (cell J2) to the Actual Date that task was completed (cell K2) to determine how many days past the Target Date the task was done. In many cases in my data set, the Actual Date is blank as the task has not yet been completed. In some cases the Target Date is in the past and in some cases it's in the future.

So I need a formula that can handle 3 scenarios:

1. If a date is recorded in cell K2, calculate the days between K2 and J2.
2. If K2 is blank and the date in J2 is in the past, calculate the days between J2 and Today's date.
3. If K2 is blank and the date in J2 is in the future, return a result of 0.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

If you have a column of full names, type the first name of the first person in the next column, then press Ctrl+E. Excel fills the rest by copying your pattern. Do the same in another column for last names. It works for pulling out parts of emails, codes and dates too. Just check a few rows afterward, since names with middle initials can trip it up.

I'm looking for help with making this process easier and faster for myself. The pictures below should explain it pretty well, but I have a list of serial numbers that are basically a "to do" list and another list that are completed that need to be marked off on the original list. I have been using CTRL C CTRL V to search between the spreadsheets, and I feel like there's definitely a more efficient way to do one massive search in order to mark them off in bulk. Any help on this subject would be much appreciated! I was previously trying to use a COUNTIF formula but the way I typed it was yielding very inconsistent results.

Link to help visualize it https://imgur.com/a/DxI3W9G

Hey ya'll, I have a spreadsheet that looks like this and has tens of thousands of lines. I am hoping there is a way to filter or weed out all of the Cases that only have a single location inside them. So from the attached, for example, I would only want to keep "Case 2."

So I’m working on creating some moving date range charts (year to date, updates monthly, so each time I update it, the range would go from, for example, 6/1/25-6/1/26 to 7/1/25-7/1/26) that work with a macro that inserts the new data in a column in front of the old data. Basically, column D becomes column E, and the new stuff is now column D. The thing is, I want to keep the data set as column D—column P, but when the new column gets inserted, the dataset shifts E—Q. How to I keep this from happening? Do I have to edit the macro? Or maybe try using a named cell reference as the chart dataset? Would love some help.

I need some help here. Up until today, my top row of headers (File, Home, Insert, Share, etc) were always there. When I would hover over them, then the entire ribbon would expand. Now, the entire ribbon is always there!! It’s so annoying. I tried changing it to automatically hide, but then the headers go away! Was there an update or something? Anyone know how to fix?

We're organizing a boulder competition next week and we're working with a 1000-points system.

• Each boulder is worth 1000 points divided by the amount of people who topped it.
• There are 70 boulders with increasing difficulty
• In the row 'TOTAAL PER BOULDER', I count how many people have topped the boulder with a COUNTA function
• In the row 'PUNTEN PER BOULDER', I calculate how many points the boulder is worth by dividing 1000 with the amount of people that topped the boulder

Now I want to calculate how many points each person got, but I'm having trouble with finding the correct function. I want to do something like what a foreach does in C#, but I have no idea how this works in excel.

As an example, when an 'x' is put down for boulder 1, I want that cell to be worth the amount of points allocated in the bottom row. Then, all the points of the entire row should be counted up to the total.

Reference image - https://i.imgur.com/sfPvevj.png

Basically, how do I link the value in the bottom row to the marked cells in the participant list above it and sum everything up.

Thanks in advance. If there is an easier way to do this, I would love to hear it.

=FORECAST.LINEAR(A32, $B$20:$B$31, $A$20:$A$31)

The formula I've been using is returning #VALUE!

Hello everyone

I am new to using power query, is it possible to build a transformation flow that lets me choose the specific file each time I run it? Would this be better for a macro rather than power query?

Basically what I want to do is download a daily list of work items, load up into power query and transform the data using power query. I don't want to have to recreate the transformation steps each time I download a new file and likewise I do not want to replace existing files in the folder so that the newest file is always the one that it draws from.

Is it possible to combine features so that I can select a file to pull from and then automatically apply all of my transformations?

Thanks for any help!!

I have a stacked calendar in excel (it goes from Jan to Dec continuously). Only the days as numbers are written (formatted as Date as seen in the screenshot).

I want to conditionally format the 15th and 30th of each month, by highlighting them or something of that sort, how do I do that?

I recently switched from Windows to Mac after my old windows laptop finally gave up on me.

I use Excel a lot for work, and on Windows I lived on the Alt key to get around the ribbon (e.g. Alt+H+B+N to remove a cell border). So I’ve been googling how to navigate the ribbon with the keyboard on Mac, and every single answer is some version of “you can’t.” Apparently that’s just how it is?

It’s honestly driving me a bit crazy, years of muscle memory, and now I’m back to clicking through menus like it’s my first day with Excel.

Is there really no way to do this? Does anyone know of a way to set this up or a plugin or something?

Thanks in advance :)

My references like '\\network\accounting\[Cost Codes]sheet1'!D2 are being replaced with:

'file:///\\network\accounting\[Cost Codes?B334903]sheet1'!D2'

It has ruined many spreadsheets. This started last night and kept me at work until very late trying to fix it. Nothing seems to have changed otherwise.

I turned off the Proofing setting to 'fix' network paths for me.

If i edit the cell to remove the file:/// part it will re-add it as soon as i press enter. It is driving me mad as I have a presentation in a couple of hours and my spreadsheet model is basically broken.

The AI is no help - it thinks the file is on sharepoint when it's on a network share (and so is the file connecting to it- in fact in the same folder) and I am using Excel 365, enterprise version, with the latest updates (desktop app).

Please help. I am so tired and desperate.

Hello,

I am trying to make a page layout with an image. I added the image as a header and increased the size beyond the page borders. All margins are at zero but still a white line remains at the top of the page, it is also visible in PDF.

Can someone help me remove this white bar at the top?

I wonder if you guys can help me with this. Let's say I have a list of people who have done a tattoo and a piercing in the last year with the dates of each job in one column.

Is there a good way to pick out which people have done both things, and exclude people who have only done one thing several times? I have already excluded people who are wholly unique entries, that's easy, but there are a lot of people who have done three or four tattoos and no piercings, or the other way around. How do I exclude them?

I was asked to pick out which people have done a tattoo within say 15 days after their piercing. How do I do that in a simple way? I know how to check how many days have passed from one date to another, but here I never know how many entries of each job there'll be and therefore end up comparing a lot of dates of one tattoo to the next rather than one tattoo to the nearest piercing. I woke up thinking I could just move the dates on one event from column A to column B and then compare, but surely it can't be that easy? I'd just end up comparing one date to an empty cell in the next column, wouldn't I?

Thank you for your help! I usually just do this manually, which is tedious but manageable when I'm dealing with 500 entries, but this time we're talking 100k+ entries and I need to find a better way.

Hi! I was able to get SUMPRODUCT to work for one of these "outings" but the formula for each outing and different rates based on the "Provider code" eludes me.

I would like to take the hours in each "outing", multiply it by a value (50 for CCG or 100 for Clinician) and end with a total dollar amount based on that. Anyone have any solutions?

Thanks!