Diarmuid Early won first place in the 2025 Microsoft Excel World Championship. He has some pointers for using Excel at work.

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Handle millions of rows by loading queries into Power Pivot, building relationships, and creating measures for fast variance views.

By combining To Go Special with Ctrl+Enter, you can fill thousands of empty cells with the correct data in seconds. First, select the range or ranges containing empty cells, and press Ctrl+G > Alt+S to open the Go To Special dialog. There, check "Blanks" (or press K), and hit Enter.

Instead of being replaced by AI, Excel is finding new life with powerful AI overlays and CFOs that are doubling down on what they master.

Create a CRM using Excel with dropdown customer selection and FILTER plus XLOOKUP, saving time while keeping leads and deals organized.

FORECAST.ETS applies an exponential triple smoothing (ETS) algorithm to create forecasts that can include trend and seasonal components. The syntax for the FORECAST.ETS is =FORECAST.ETS (target_date, values, timeline, [seasonality], [data_completion], [aggregation]).