The community and its content is now free for all ICAEW members to access, and we’ll be continuing to bring you the latest and greatest Excel tips, functionality and guidance.
Since becoming free for ICAEW members at the end of last year, The Excel Community has grown by a truly incredible 700% and now exceeds 16,000 members, making it one of ICAEW’s largest communities. So first and foremost, thank you to everyone who has signed up.
Navigating Your Community
With over 1000 articles, over 460 tips, 4 thought leadership guides and an extensive webinar recording archive, we realise that it can sometimes be tricky to find what you’re looking for. So, for new members (and maybe a recap for old ones too!), here’s a few pointers to get you started:
Firstly, bookmark icaew.com/excel right now! All of our latest content can be found on the main page here.
Our latest articles section covers a wide range of topics, from latest Excel features and functionality, to solving common problems and making the most of your spreadsheets – in a typical month we publish around 8-10 tips and articles so it’s always worth a look. We even cover some non-Excel topics too!
Our Excel Tips and Tricks articles (previously ‘Tip of the Week’) explore individual features in a little more detail, so you can really learn how to use them effectively. The full index is categorised by topic and level.
You can see all of our previous webinars here, and all of our upcoming ones here – we’ve got a ‘Tips and Tricks’ live coming up later this month, and check back soon for more details of future webinars as we just finalise our plans for these in the coming weeks.
Our major thought leadership publications cover key aspects of spreadsheet management - design principles, a competency framework, financial modelling code, and spreadsheet review guidance.
If you’re looking for articles about a particular topic, there are a few ways to do this. The ICAEW search can be used to find any article across the main ICAEW website (and don’t forget, adding “ICAEW Excel” to any search in Google will also return community content). But – our archive also extends to our legacy ION platform, which contains many more articles. Our Knowledge Base provides access to all community content by topic, as well as the ability to search the ION archive by keyword. You can also browse the archive index, or, for a more interactive experience, our regular contributor and Advisory Group member, Simon Hurst, has put together a Power BI dashboard featuring all articles tagged by keyword, author and date, which can be accessed here.
Look out for our monthly newsletters which will go out towards the end of each month and provide a roundup of everything that we’ve done that month, as well as looking ahead to upcoming webinars and events.
You can also follow us on Twitter at https://twitter.com/ICAEW_Excel, and engage with us on LinkedIn using our new hashtag #ICAEWExcel.
Coming Soon
Here’s some of the exciting things you can look forward to over the coming year, for our community members:
We’ll be giving the community pages a refresh to bring all ICAEW communities onto the same design and layout – this will hopefully make it easier to navigate and find the content.
Alongside our regular tips, we’ll be putting together articles that address some of your real-world Excel problems.
Later this month we’ll be launching the first in a series of articles that highlights the very best of our 10+ years worth of Excel content – the tips and guides that no Excel user should be without – think “A History of the World in 100 Objects” but for Excel!
An ICAEW Excel toolbar, which is currently in development and will make it easier for you to ensure your spreadsheets adhere to our Twenty principles as well as providing some quick shortcuts to useful but hard-to-access Excel functionality.
Our new Spreadsheet Competency Framework Assessment tool, to help assess your own skills against our competency framework.
As a new ICAEW mobile app launches soon, we’ll be looking at ways to use this to engage members and spread Excel best practice.
Later this year we are also planning to host an in-person event at Chartered Accountants’ Hall in London – watch this space for details!
= Crucially, we’re also keen to involve you, our community members, in our content. We have some plans in the pipeline to make the community more interactive, but in the meantime, if you have any suggestions for topics, or have an Excel problem that you’d love for us to help solve, please don’t hesitate to email us at excel@icaew.com. Here’s to a great year ahead!
Archive and Knowledge Base
This archive of Excel Community content from the ION platform will allow you to read the content of the articles but the functionality on the pages is limited. The ION search box, tags and navigation buttons on the archived pages will not work. Pages will load more slowly than a live website. You may be able to follow links to other articles but if this does not work, please return to the archive search. You can also search our Knowledge Base for access to all articles, new and archived, organised by topic.