Excel

Work is more collaborative than ever, and finance pros need a spreadsheet program that can keep up. Google Sheets is ideal for the way we work today.

Google Apps Script may appear familiar to those with knowledge of Microsoft’s Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) language. However, Google’s coding offers more integrations and the ability to harness workflows seamlessly across spreadsheets, documents, and presentations.

Hidden in Excel and Power BI is a powerful data analysis pack named Get & Transform (previously known as Power Query). It is an ETL pack for cleaning and sorting raw data from a range of input sources, such as CSV and text files. This tutorial demonstrates how to–quite literally– get and transform data in Excel, in ways that can help the data analyst save time and uncover more insight.

With the arrival and growing ubiquity of big data, Excel, as a data-mining and processing tool has been pushed to its limits—reflected in its dated 1,048,576 row hard limit and the application’s processing speed slowing to a crawl. As of 2010, Microsoft released a Power Pivot function that transformed the scope and usefulness of Excel where the extraction, combination, and analysis of large datasets are concerned.

Using live cases, Finance Expert Ellen Su explores in detail how to master Power Pivot and explores its hidden advantages as a big data tool.