Posts about Automation.
LAMBDA, MAP, REDUCE, SCAN, BYROW. These are functional programming primitives. Excel is shipping them one by one, and most users are still writing nested IFs. The spreadsheet you learned in 2015 has been quietly replaced by something much more powerful.
Step-by-step from a blank flow, including how to handle the parts that break the first time.
Cloud flows are great when your data lives in SharePoint or Teams. But some processes still live in legacy apps, PDFs, or the export button of a system that predates APIs.
Automation bias is real: if you can automate something, it feels like you should. But some processes contain judgement calls that automation silently gets wrong, edge cases that require human revie…
Your flow runs daily — but you only need it Monday through Friday. One condition block and a formatDateTime expression, and your automation skips Saturday and Sunday without you touching it. Three …
You'll build a summary that calculates a custom metric for every row in your dataset without a pivot table, without helper columns, and without copying formulas down. BYROW plus a LAMBDA gives you …
This isn't 'what is a variable' Python. This is: you have a CSV that's too big for Excel, you need it filtered by date and category, and you need the result saved as a clean file. Part 1 covers exa…
You'll build a balance tracker using SCAN and a structured table that extends itself as new rows come in. No helper columns, no fragile cell references, no 'just re-paste the formula down.' Add a r…
Running totals used to mean helper columns or array gymnastics. SCAN changes that — it applies a function cumulatively across an array and hands you back every intermediate result. Once you see it …
Before LAMBDA, every Excel function that existed was one Microsoft decided to write. After LAMBDA, you can write them yourself — naming the logic, hiding the complexity, and calling your custom fun…
Your Word templates shouldn't fight you on formatting.
You'll build a reusable Power Query that finds the most recent entry per group - the kind of query that normally tempts people into messy MAXIFS workarounds in Excel. We're doing it properly, wit…
You built the flow. It ran perfectly for two months. Then a colleague renamed a SharePoint column, or moved a file, or changed a dropdown value - and everything stopped. This isn't bad luck. It's…
Five minutes to set up a SharePoint file-change trigger with a Teams notification. You'll never manually check whether that report got updated again.
It is 2026, and we are still stringing together premium Power Automate connectors just to avoid the Word mail merge wizard.