Posts about Productivity.
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.
In a small team, you're the analyst, the engineer, the dashboard designer, and the person who explains what a p-value is at the all-hands.
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…
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.
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 …
They ask for a pie chart when they need a bar chart. They ask for a table when they need a trend line. This isn't ignorance — it's that they're translating a question into a visual type without kno…
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…
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 delivered a clean model, a solid dashboard, a real solution — and got a blank look in the room. The work was right. But explaining technical work to someone who doesn't share your frame of refe…
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.
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…
You'll build a clean single-page report: KPI cards, a trend line, and one slicer. The kind that gets opened voluntarily, not just emailed as a screenshot. Starting from a blank canvas, ending with …
The advice is everywhere: if you're serious about data, you need SQL. But for most analysts already working in Excel and Power BI, the gap isn't SQL knowledge - it's data modelling instinct. Here…
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…