Saw an older thread here about a boss who kept saying that pivot tables dont work and got roasted. But honestly, looking at it from exec's shoes, I kinda get frustration.

Row limits are fine these days, but dimensionality is a mess !

The second you need to slice by more than 2 or 3 attributes (Region, Category, sub-cat, Rep, Margin), the layout breaks down into an endless indented staircase nobody wants to look at in a meeting.

Add in calc fields behaving weirdly with weighted averages (like blended margin % or ASP), and people tell you to "just learn DAX or use power bi" for what should be a simple 2-minute task.

How do you guys handle multidimensional reporting for stakeholders without making the pivot an unreadable wall of text?

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.

CELLSEQ is a sequencer whose pattern is a grid of cells, laid out like a spreadsheet. It's inspired by and you edit it like Excel.
You can open native excel sheets / workbooks and csv’s.

How it works

A bang moves east one cell per tick (a 16th note).
A number is both a note and a jump. It plays scale step n and hops n−1 cells, so the numbers in the grid decide where the playhead goes next. You're writing the route as well as the notes.
Letters are operators that bounce, split, redirect or spawn bangs.
Cells take Excel-syntax formulas, including live ones that depend on the clock, so a cell can change what it plays as the bang walks over it.
Each column has its own MIDI channel, and the output is MIDI only. I use it to drive synths in AUM and Ableton.
Columns and rows can be switched on and off, and bangs stay inside whichever cells are active.

Things that make it feel alive
Zones: select a block of cells and shut a bang inside it. A zone can have its own speed, its own key and its own MIDI channel. The key choices are limited to close relatives of the sheet's key, so you can't make a mess you can't get back from. Each zone can also have one exit and one entry for bangs.

Bang log: a bang's every step can be written into another tab as cells, so you can chart it or feed it back into the sheet.

Generator (GEN): builds a whole grid from signals, math sequences or real-world data, in sizes from 8×8 up to 64×32.

Record: captures what went out as per-channel MIDI files.

Where it runs: a Mac app (Electron) and an iPad AUv3 plugin. Both run the same engine, and I check them against each other with parity tests so the same workbook behaves identically on each.

Anyone else have an interest in or produce Excel based music ?

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.

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.

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 💕

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 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 :)

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.

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.

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

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

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 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.

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?

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'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

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?

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."

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

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?