Your very own Excel nickname
Just before midday on Easter Monday, rumours starting circulating concerning a significant Excel update. Apparently, consideration is being given to adding an Excel nickname to the personalisation details in Excel Options. The File, Options, General, ‘Personalize your copy of Microsoft Office’ section already allows you to enter a User name that is displayed when commenting for example, but another field could be added to allow entry of a nickname as well:
It is possible that the timing, coming over the same weekend as the final of BBC’s Gladiators extravaganza, is not coincidental.
In advance of this opportunity, it might be worth giving some consideration to what your Excel nickname could be. There are some fairly obvious possibilities based on Excel functions, including POWER, UNIQUE and, for those that like to play the Excel pantomime villain, MEAN. Choosing something a little more obscure, we could have YIELD and ‘the COUNT’. Given that an honest assessment of the level of your own Excel skills is often a mark of advanced Excel knowledge, AVERAGE is also a possibility, with the ICAEW Spreadsheet Competency Framework available to help you decide.
Other nicknames might be based on what you use Excel for, ‘schemer’ being a recent high-profile example. We could also have ‘the analyser’ or ‘the calculator’. For those who are particularly adept at using spreadsheet charts and graphics ‘legend’ might be appropriate, while ‘the normaliser’ would work for those keen on getting their data structures correct.
If you are looking to link your Excel nickname to your actual name then Annes and Andrews could go for ANDy, Maximillians and Minnies have MAX and MIN and any Matthews could choose CONDITIONAL4. Of course, if your name is April, things might not be so straightforward, but with Microsoft looking to revolutionise the capabilities of all the Office applications with Copilot, A1 is worth considering.
Do you already have an Excel nickname, or can you suggest something suitable? Let us know at:excel@icaew.com
Conclusion
You can explore Excel options, the extensive range of Excel functions and a great deal more, in the ICAEW archive:
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