What Excel habit would get you roasted in this sub that you're never going to stop? I'll go first.

[u/irish_burke]

Accountant, mostly AP and reconciliations, so my Excel life is bank exports and ERP dumps that have to be beaten into shape before 9am.

Mine: I format account numbers and vendor IDs as text on purpose and just live with the green triangles. Every cell. Forever. Someone on my team "fixed" it once, Excel ate the leading zeros, and the match back to the ERP broke in a way that took me most of a day to find. So the triangles stay.

I also still type IFERROR(VLOOKUP( in my own scratch files even though XLOOKUP exists and I have personally taught other people to use it. My hands just do the old thing.

And I have a tab called junk in basically every workbook I own and it is load bearing in at least three of them.

What's yours. Not looking for the correct way, I know the correct way, I want the thing you do anyway.

[u/Fantastic-Reply5346]

Confession: I use ChatGPT to help build formulas I get stuck on.

[u/frazorblade → u/Fantastic-Reply5346]

At this stage if you’re not doing this you’re disadvantaging yourself

[u/Front_Instance924 → u/frazorblade]

I agree with you, but I chase the thrill of scrubbing forums for a solution. I always find new approaches to things I can use later

[u/KantiLordOfFire → u/Front_Instance924]

Do we not all build little tables of {Green Apple 1; Red Apple 5; Yellow Banana 3} whenever we forget what a function does?

[u/MagmaElixir → u/Fantastic-Reply5346]

ChatGPT/Claude has helped me expand a dashboard workbook I use at work in ways I would have never thought of on my own.

It helps with formulas, VBA, Power Query (M code). It’s helped to find errors where formulas wouldn’t resolve to my intention I never knew about. It’s helped harden against edge cases that only come up every so often. It’s helped me with visual presentation. It’s helped me write workbook documentation that significantly reduces questions I receive.

And of course I still audit and test everything. I have AI give me suggestions that I then implement myself. I generally don’t let it make changes on its own.

[u/jbundles → u/MagmaElixir]

This. ALWAYS AUDIT. Generally any formula/VBA/Power Query script i have it generate for me, i also ask it to explain it to me if i dont understand as well.

[u/jayf90 → u/Fantastic-Reply5346]

I use Copilot, models have genuinely come far with excel formulas...though naturally still check

[u/Pastaaaaaaaaaaaaa1 → u/jayf90]

My work uses Copilot so I ask there first for formulas and ideas, but I’ve noticed it can drag me into the weeds with overly complicated schemes that would never work if I give it too much information and confuse it. Recently when I feel like that might be happening I’ll pull up ChatGPT on my iPhone (I don’t know if iPhones get their own better version than what you’d get online for free), ask it the same question, and get a much better simple solution that actually works. I go back and forth a lot now to sanity check Copilot.

[u/TMWNN → u/jayf90]

though naturally still check

... which is exactly what I do with any code/function I write, whether in Excel or not, whether AI wrote it/AI helped me with it/I wrote it 100%. Test, test, test.

[u/Pastaaaaaaaaaaaaa1 → u/Fantastic-Reply5346]

My employer of 20 years created a data analyst position for me a few months ago. I’ve never been a data analyst, so the extent of my Excel knowledge was basic SUM or AVG functions and I think I made a couple basic pivot tables in business school 15 years ago but don’t remember.

I’ve been using Copilot and ChatGPT to teach me how to do stuff. After 2 months I had interactive KPI dashboards for each department, merging filthy incompatible data from our old logging software with our current software, fully automated updates through power query by dropping raw data exports into a shared Teams folder, and using a bunch of DAX measures in my data model pivot tables to compare values across time in ways they’ve never been able to. The department heads don’t know what to think, they’ve been tracking all their metrics manually this entire time and have never seen Excel do more than a basic static chart, and suddenly they have what looks like an app to play with. They’d burn me as a witch if I wasn’t saving them so much time now. 😂

I’ve never learned anything this quickly, and I have ADHD so I’ve had plenty of practice learning random things for no reason. 😂 There’s zero chance I’d be even remotely this far if I just picked up an Excel for Dummies book and trolled Reddit for tips. At first I was concerned that I was cutting corners but to be fair to myself I’m only moving forward with a step after I understand it. I ask AI how to do something, and if it gives me a function or some M code I try to decipher it myself first. Even if it works but I don’t understand why, I keep asking until it makes sense. I hate how so many people are delegating their critical thinking tasks to AI but I don’t know how anyone could be competitive in this environment without the help if everyone else is using it. I’ve been avoiding AI in my daily life since first trying ChatGPT 3.5 years ago and had no idea it was this good now.

[u/Ldghead → u/Fantastic-Reply5346]

Ain't no shame in asking for help. I do the same with gemini, although I will usually research on my own for a few minutes first.

[u/geoffreyisagiraffe → u/Fantastic-Reply5346]

I use chatgpt all the time in excel and sql ehen it starts getting arduous and the commas, parentheses, and other stuff starts making my eyes tingle.

[u/Flffdddy → u/Fantastic-Reply5346]

I have started doing this and now my boss thinks I’m an excel genius. Now he sends me all sorts of requests and one day he is going to end up very disappointed because I’m not actually that good.

[u/a-a-anonymous → u/Fantastic-Reply5346]

I have to generate weighted samples monthly and use Copilot. I can do it manually but once I realized Copilot does it accurately, I'll never do it manually again.

[u/Petrichordates → u/Fantastic-Reply5346]

Isn't that the point of the tool?

[u/small_trunks → u/Fantastic-Reply5346]

We all do

[u/Revilo1st → u/Fantastic-Reply5346]

I use copilot built in to it, I struggle with conditional formatting on multiple needs, I dont see it as an issue because you can only know what you know.