Posts about Efficiency.
The title changes, the salary changes, and the list of skills that matter changes completely. Worse, the things that made you good as an analyst quietly start working against you at the senior level.
The Keep Rows filter in the Power Query UI handles 80% of row filtering tasks without you ever opening the Advanced Editor. Most people skip past it and go straight to writing M. Five clicks and you're done, and the M it generates is clean enough to modify later.
The analysts who get traction aren't the fastest at pulling data, they're the best at unpacking what was actually being asked. The skill is asking good questions, and nobody trains for it.
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 can't build every dashboard that gets requested. But 'no' lands differently depending on how you say it — and most data people either say yes to everything and resent it, or say no in ways that…
Slow reports get blamed on complex measures. Complex measures get rewritten. And the report is still slow — because the actual problem is a flat table with 47 columns, many-to-many relationships, a…
The more competent you get, the less people see the effort behind what you deliver. A clean dashboard looks effortless. A fast turnaround looks like it was always fast.
Helper columns aren't wrong. But when a running total requires three of them and breaks every time someone inserts a row, you've created fragility in exchange for familiarity. The Excel array funct…
SCAN hands you every intermediate result as it accumulates — which means a running total is one formula that spills down the column. No helper rows, no dragging, no breaking when someone inserts a …
The counter-argument to 'if your formula needs a scrollbar to read, it's wrong.' With LAMBDA, complexity lives in one named place and gets called cleanly everywhere else. The formula in your cell c…
You'll build a named LAMBDA called OVERDUE that takes a date and a threshold and returns a clean status label. Then you'll call it in three different tables in the same workbook. By the end, you'll…
Your Word templates shouldn't fight you on formatting.
One function definition in the Name Manager, and every cell in the workbook can call it like a built-in. LAMBDA + named functions means you stop copy-pasting logic and start writing like someone wh…
Power Query is a brilliant transformation tool. Most of the M code in production is doing things that belong in DAX, SQL, or Python - and the models are slow and the code is unmaintainable.
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…
Table.Group in Power Query returns a table of tables, unlocking complex multi-level analysis you can't get anywhere else.
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.
Stop cringing. There's a way to talk about your accomplishments in Excel and Power BI that sounds competent, not arrogant. It's all about framing.
More charts don't mean more insight. Every visual you add is a question your stakeholder has to answer before they understand the point - and most reports ask them to answer fifteen questions bef…
Complex formulas aren't the problem. Unreadable ones are. Before LET, you had to repeat the same range reference six times or accept that your formula was a black box. LET gives you named variables in
One tweak to your most-used formula and it suddenly reads like plain English. LET() lets you name the messy middle parts — so next month's you won't need to reverse-engineer what current you was …
You deliver good work consistently, your manager knows you're reliable — and yet somehow you're invisible at promotion time. The problem isn't your output. It's that you've never made your work l…
It works, so why change it? Because every workaround you've added to compensate for VLOOKUP's limits is technical debt in your spreadsheet - and it compounds. The cost isn't visible until somethi…
Stop replacing VLOOKUPs. Your workbook deserves XLOOKUP without touching the formula.
I spent years writing 400-character Ctrl+Shift+Enter arrays just to filter a table, but the calculation engine finally changed the rules and killed that misery for good.