Over the last two years, the Excel Community has grown significantly and now exceeds 36,000 members, making it not only one of ICAEW’s largest communities, but also one of the largest communities of active Excel users in the world!

Along with the growing community, Excel and its functionality continues to evolve. As a result, we’ll continue to bring you the latest and greatest Excel tips, functionality, and guidance. But first, we take a look at some of the highlights from this year.

The best of ‘Excel Tips and Tricks’

Our Tips and Tricks articles explore individual features in a little more detail, so you can learn how to use them effectively. Your favourite five tips of the year include:

1. Excel Tips & Tricks #490 – Revisiting data entry shortcuts
   This tip summarises the simple keyboard shortcuts you can use to expedite the entry of data into Excel.
2. Excel Tips & Tricks #491 – Creating a dynamic lead schedule
   In this tip, learn how to use formulas such as VSTACK, CHOOSECOLS and FILTER to create a dynamic lead schedule with dynamic dropdown options. 
3. Excel Tips & Tricks #488 – The basics of charts in Excel
   This tip explores Excel’s rich collection of chart types available to present and visualise your data.
4. Excel Tips & Tricks #492 - How to add a custom ribbon to your workbook
   This tip takes you through a step-by-step process of creating a basic custom ribbon using VBA. 
5. Excel Tips and Tricks #495 - Excel “Tick”ery!
   In this tip, learn more about Excel’s new checkbox functionality and explore real-life use cases. 

You can find a full index of our 490+ Tips and Tricks articles in the Hints and Tips index. The index is categorised by topic and competency level to make it easier to navigate.

The best of our content

Throughout the year, our members get access to a variety of webinars, blogs, and articles. This year, our content covered a wide range of Excel functionalities and concepts.

We completed our popular webinar series on Microsoft’s ‘Power Tools’ this year by covering how to build dynamic dashboards using Power Pivot and transform wider business processes using Power Apps. As an Excel Community member, you have on-demand access to the rest of the series and all of our previous webinar recordings.

Though most of our webinars tend to be hour-long in-depth sessions, this year we introduced a new series of bitesize webinars for members looking to pick up useful tricks during their lunch break. This lunch and learn series features 30-minute webinars on using visualisation in Excel to bring financial reports to life.

With our large membership, we receive a lot of engagement and questions in our webinars. One of the ways we address questions and queries is through our ‘Tips and Tricks Live’ webinars. This year, we hosted three sessions to make sure we address as many of your questions as possible, and to give you practical help and guidance. You can watch the recordings to catch up, or sign up to our upcoming webinar in January 2025 if you have a burning Excel problem you’re eager to get solved!

Our priority is to make sure members stay on top of the latest developments in Excel and the wider Office suite. This year, we continued our webinar series that covers some of the major new tech features including what’s new in Excel. We also helped members learn how to best use a range of new functionality including using checkboxes, LAMBDA, PIVOTBY and GROUPBY, the benefits of Office scripts, and Excel’s newest functions for data analysis.

We are very proud of the thought leadership our advisory group and volunteer experts have produced over the years. We launched a refreshed version of the ‘Twenty principles for good spreadsheet practice’ in April this year to reflect significant changes in the way we work with data and spreadsheets. The refreshed principles were launched with a successful event that saw 170 members visit Chartered Accountants’ Hall to hear from some of the experts and network with peers.

As part of our wider CPD content, we’ve worked closely with our CPD team to develop a series of six online, self-directed modules to help you master Excel. They cover the basics of navigation through to more advanced skills such as working with large sets of data and using macros.

• View all six modules here

Looking ahead

Looking ahead In 2025, we will cover more on the new functionality available in Excel. Our content will explore how to best use Python and Copilot in Excel as these functionalities become more widely available. As more functions continue to be released, including the introduction of new regular expression functions, we’re looking forward to sharing use cases and practical examples to make the most of them.

We are excited to bring our members a fresh take on our popular Tips and Tricks webinars, with sessions more focused on specific topics such as Power BI and financial modelling. Members will still be able to ask their questions and will gain a full hour of expert tips and tricks in these areas. And our Tips and Tricks articles will be celebrating a very special milestone early in 2025 – do look out for tip #500!

Following the popularity of our lunch and learn series, in 2025 we will build on this to bring our members a range of webinars so you can choose between hour-long in-depth interactive sessions to answer your questions or shorter, bitesize webinars so you can pick up a new trick or two.

This year, in addition to refreshing the Twenty Principles, we have updated our other thought leadership materials, including the ‘Financial Modelling Code’ and ‘How to Review a Spreadsheet,’ to align with the new principles. Next year, our focus will be on the ‘Spreadsheet Competency Framework,’ aiming to provide our members with an enhanced and modern structure for evaluating their proficiency in using Excel.

We also want to provide members with more opportunities to attend in-person events to network and learn from the wide range of experts in this space. As a result, we have partnered with Global Excel Summit and will be attending their 2025 annual conference in February. Excel Community members get an exclusive discount on tickets to attend the conference.

Next year, our members can also look forward to more interactivity. This year, we launched a LinkedIn group for members to share tips and ask questions. Members can expect more resources here, including advice from experts, opportunities to ask questions, and discussions on exclusive content.

In 2025, we intend to cover more relevant content and topics through articles, interactive webinars, and on-demand content to help you Excel wherever you are in your professional and learning journey. If you have any thoughts or suggestions on what you’d like us to cover or would like to get involved to contribute to the success of the community, do drop us an email at Excel@icaew.com. We’d be delighted to hear from you!

2025 subscription

Over the last few years, the Excel Community output has increased for its members, and you will be able to see from this article the support you have received this year alone. From next year, we will also be able to share with you an exclusive discount of over 55% for this training bundle. With this in mind, we have taken the decision to bring the Excel Community subscription in line with the other communities to £135. It is easy to renew your membership. Click here and follow the steps.