As our community surpasses 40,000 members, one of our goals has been to provide our members with opportunities to attend in-person events to network and learn from a wide range of experts in this space. As a result, last year we established a partnership with Global Excel Summit to provide our members with the opportunity to attend the 2025 conference, held at the Soho Place Theatre in London. Representatives of the Excel Community Advisory Group, alongside a small ICAEW team, also attended the conference to build awareness of our community and all the great work we’re doing in this space to educate and inform our community members.

The conference featured some of the top names in the world of Excel, as well as some popular ICAEW members and Excel Community contributors. Showcasing both brand new functionality alongside critical best practices and skills, here we’re sharing some of the key insights and takeaways.

What’s new in Excel?

In her opening session, Excel superstar Leila Gharani kicked off the summit with a session on what’s new in Excel! Leila covered some great examples of the latest functions and features including the new focus cell feature. She also demonstrated a use case for TRIMRANGE, a function that trims empty cells before and after a range which is just starting to rollout to Current Channel users. If you haven’t used this before, you can use TRIMRANGE and TAKE to shorten formulas to select a specific range of values such as values over the last 12 months. This will save calculation time by excluding empty cells especially in calculations using dynamic array references. She also covered the new REGEX functions that can be helpful to filter, extract and replace data formatted in text in Excel. You can learn more about the syntax for these functions using this free resource and we plan to explore REGEX in more detail later this year. Do note that some of these features are still just starting to roll out so you might not see them in your version of Excel just yet!

Following on from this, Chris Webb, Principal Program Manager at Microsoft, took stage to discuss updates in Power BI and Fabric, and how concepts in Fabric mirror and enhance those in Excel but at a larger scale for analytics. For example, anyone well versed with Power Query in Excel should be able to use data flows in Fabric. New updates in Fabric and Excel will also allow users to easily create tables in Excel using enterprise level data from Fabric. You can learn more about Microsoft Fabric in this webinar from our Data Analytics community.

Copilot has been a hot topic since last year, but one of the most common questions we get is – so how do I use it with Excel? George Mount, author and Microsoft MVP, covered how to use Copilot and Python in Excel to enable advanced data analytics. George demonstrated how you can use smart suggestions from ‘Advanced Analytics’ in Copilot, to analyse data in your table with Python. If you’re unsure where to start with Copilot in Excel, you can watch our webinar on this topic on-demand.

Alan Murray, author and Microsoft MVP, then covered the most anticipated new functions in Excel - GROUPBY and PIVOTBY, and how these could replace Pivot Tables! Alan demonstrated how to use these new functions to create a summary report from a table of data with a single formula without creating a Pivot Table. You can learn more about these functions and how these compare to Pivot Tables in this article, or sign-up to attend our upcoming webinar on this topic!

Mark Proctor, a Microsoft MVP and ICAEW member, as well as a regular contributor to our Excel Community, presented a session on achieving the ‘zero-click dream’ through the use of Office Scripts and Power Automate. He demonstrated the process of creating a dynamic workflow aimed at automating repetitive tasks, which often take significant time during the month-end reporting process. For those who are unfamiliar with Office Scripts, you can watch our on-demand webinar by Mark on this topic.

A focus on modelling

Liam Bastick, Managing Director at SumProduct, Microsoft MVP, and FCA, shifted the focus to best practices for spreadsheet use in financial modelling. He emphasised good design to minimise errors and assist organisations in reviewing spreadsheets, highlighting four key principles: consistency, robustness, flexibility, and transparency.

ICAEW’s Financial Modelling Code also acknowledges these principles and provides guidance on applying them to models.

Later on in the conference, Ian Schnoor, Director at the Financial Modelling Institute (FMI), took stage to share practical tips for reviewing spreadsheets. Some of our favourite quick wins were:

• Zoom out - see how the financial model you’re reviewing is built and identify any out of view data islands.
• Very hidden sheets – find those hidden sheets in your workbook Excel won’t tell you about using VBA. We cover how to do this in Tip #460.
• Hardcoded numbers – identify inconsistencies in formulas using ‘Go To Special’ to find constants and row differences in your model. You can learn more in this article.

If you are interested in building skills in financial modelling, ICAEW have partnered with FMI to offer members access to the Advanced Financial Modeler (AFM) accreditation.

Danielle Stein Fairhurst, a Microsoft MVP and financial modeller, emphasised the importance of using Excel as a communication tool. She focused on how to select and create effective visualisations in Excel by understanding the message and audience. Important considerations were covered, such as whether you're comparing data or examining its composition, and whether you need to show data at a single point in time or over a period. Fairhurst also showed how tables and charts from Excel can easily be linked and embedded into PowerPoint to enhance presentations and ensure up-to-date figures. We cover how to do this in Tip #483.

Building the skills

On day two of the conference, there was a wider focus on the gap in skills and the challenge of measuring competency that can create inefficiencies in a workplace. Fay Bordbar, Global Digital Skills Lead at Forvis Mazars and ICAEW member, introduced this topic by sharing their efforts to engage staff. Fay described how a combination of creating engaging content, self-administered tests and awarding digital badges has helped to drive an interest in the firm and create a community of in-house Excel wizards. And the results prove how effective teaching the basics and building confidence can be - they estimate a saving of over €9 million a year in billable time from this initiative.

Ken Puls and Oz Du Soleil, both MVPs and founders of their respective Excel training consultancies, tackled the issue of defining competencies in Excel. Training in Excel is frequently categorised into beginner, intermediate, and advanced levels. However, given the extensive functionality of Excel and the various ways it is used, these labels often lack clarity - the vast majority of Excel users would score themselves as 7 out of 10, regardless of actual ability! Puls and Du Soleil argued that distinguishing between users and builders, is essential to effectively address the challenge of training and that there is a ‘dance’ to be done when discussing between organisations and trainers to establish their requirements. They emphasised that it is more important for individuals to learn what is applicable to their specific job and purpose rather than constantly focusing on techniques or a particular ‘level’ of skill.

ICAEW’s Spreadsheet Competency Framework adopts a similar approach. This framework splits competency and Excel’s functions and features into General and Basic users, and Creators and Developers, who will need very distinct skillsets. A project is shortly kicking off to revise our competency framework to ensure it remains relevant for the way people interact with modern spreadsheet applications. We value thoughts and contributions towards this, which can be sent to us at excel@icaew.com.

The conference came to a close with a panel session with Ian Pay, Head of Data Analytics and Tech at ICAEW, on spreadsheet standards and how to avoid the next big spreadsheet disaster that can cost millions. The panel agreed that we need to change the way we think about spreadsheet errors as these are often human caused, by misuse or a lack of oversight. Ian and the others on the panel discussed how consistency, a focus on data structure and quality, and adequate training can make the biggest difference in empowering people to spot and address errors and issues. However, this can be inhibited by the range of prescriptive standards and codes out there for the use of Excel. This is acknowledged in ICAEW’s 20 Principles, which sets out a principle-based outline of how to best use spreadsheets and Excel.

If you missed the chance to attend this year, you can find out more about the Global Excel Summit here.