Andrew Moss

Today, I went to the Apple Store in Covent Garden to get my iPhone 15 Pro Max battery replaced. I refuse to pay an arm and a leg for a…

Walk into an Apple Store and you’ll notice something subtle about the MacBooks on display. They’re all positioned at exactly 76°. At first glance, it seems like an oddly specific…

On Sunday, I visited a Premier League training ground for the first time. I’ve been to plenty of football stadiums over the years, but this was something different. The visit…

Today, I asked Copilot to go and sit on the naughty step. I’ll tell you why… Recently, it’s become a regular thing for me to do what I call a…

20/12/2025: “I think a sub-45 [10K] is within reach in 2026.” So it proved, as I beat my 45:38 from then with a 44:45 today — a 53-second improvement. I…

Custom formatting is a great way to control how values are displayed, but formats are designed to sit on a single line, which isn’t always ideal. Take a football match…

Excel’s calculation engine just got upgraded. And it’s the biggest change since dynamic arrays came about at the back end of the last decade. Formulas can now respond to the…

Some people are very prescriptive about how things should be done. They’ll tell you there’s a ‘proper way’ — a set process you’re supposed to follow. But the reality is,…

When you open a file in Excel with US dates (month/day/year), things can quietly go wrong. The US is the only major country in the world that uses this format…

Focus Cell is a great feature that has only been around for 1½ years, despite many people requesting it for years before. With a single click of the button on…

Earlier today, I caught up with the latest episode of Unpivot. Host Wyn Hopkins introduced a new feature called ‘Worth a follow’, and I was delighted to be Mark Proctor‘s…

Since IMPORTTEXT and IMPORTCSV were announced earlier this month, I’ve seen a few people asking the same question: What’s the point of these functions when we already have Power Query?…

Some spelling errors are easy to forgive. A missing apostrophe, a rushed typo, a stray capital letter — we’ve all been there. But contextual spelling errors are different. They’re harder…

Saw this Evri bag today and instantly spotted an apostrophe inconsistency — shortly followed by a comma splice. There are three instances of the contraction “I’m” that all use a…

✅ Final 10K test run of 2025. 45:38 is nine seconds better than what I did in September, although I’ve had my fair share of coughs and colds since then,…

There’s a certain irony about FIFA’s anti-discrimination campaign. Using platitudinous slogans like “no discrimination” and “football is for everyone”, but then announcing World Cup ticket prices that are beyond the…

Running counts are useful for tracking how many times a value occurs consecutively. In this example, the football results in B2:B16 contain W for win, D for draw, and L…

Christmas shopping on Amazon is hard enough without having to trawl through fake reviews, sponsored listings and… misleading and inaccurate descriptions. Take this USB cable, for example. I was after…

If you ever get disoriented in the worksheet grid, Focus Cell makes it much easier to stay on track. It highlights the active cell’s row and column so you can…

If you’re stress-testing a worksheet, running a simulation, or building a financial model, generating random numbers is a great way to explore different scenarios. Watch the video Here are three…

If you’re handling schedules, managing tasks, or reviewing financial data, highlighting today’s date, the current workweek, and the upcoming weekend makes everything easier to track. Assuming your dates are in…

Full-scale charts can clutter a worksheet, which is why in-cell charts are helpful — they save space while still letting you scan data quickly. Excel offers options like Sparklines and…

On a mild yet wet, muddy, and sludgy early morning, my Saturday 12 km run turned into a bit of an obstacle course in places. However, I was doing fine…

Happy birthday to Excel! Check out my video reflecting on its beginnings and the path that led to where it is today. Watch the video Transcript Microsoft Excel is 40!…

If you think Excel’s worksheet and workbook protection will truly keep your files secure — think again. Both are surprisingly easy to bypass. That’s bad news if you’re relying on…

Tech hygiene. Those are the words that accompany WHOOSH!, a brand of screen-cleaning products designed for a wide range of devices. Since the advent of touchscreen phones and tablets, smudginess…

Having a title in each of your Excel worksheets is often a good idea to help distinguish between them. Typically, you’ll want the title to be the same as the…

More than ever in this heavily commercialised world, companies feel compelled to jump on special events with marketing gimmicks and flash-in-the-pan campaigns. Whether it’s limited-edition packaging, novelty products, or cheeky…

Lists in Excel often need to be reshaped depending on the task at hand. Sometimes you’ll have a flat list, where each value appears in its own row without any…

Five years ago (almost to the day), I published my first-ever blog post. It also happened to be on my birthday, funnily enough. What did I decide to write about? Well,…

Here’s my Vanilla Iced Matcha Latte. I purchased it today from Cafe Nero for £4.50. What do you notice? That’s right, it’s full of big blocky ice cubes. There’s about…

If you copy a set of hyperlinks with friendly text from a website and paste them into Excel, each URL is embedded as part of the cell’s metadata. This poses…

If you’re presenting an Excel formula for auditing, troubleshooting, or educational purposes, the FORMULATEXT function is very handy. It lets you display the formula from a cell (or range) as…

I was only trying to give my rabbit a Hollywood smile using the Format Painter tool, but that blimmin’ Copilot button got in the way again! Thankfully, it is possible…

In Excel, it’s easy to insert the current date and time into a cell. You only have to press Ctrl + ; for the date and Ctrl + Shift +…

It’s funny how your memory can play tricks on you. I was convinced the lectern at last year’s Global Excel Summit was made of some shade of mahogany wood —…

Wow! What can I say? It’s crazy to think a week has already flown by since the eve of the Global Excel Summit 2025. Reading all the rave reviews flooding…

For the second year running, I’m delighted to have participated in John Michaloudis‘ The Best Microsoft Excel Tips & Tricks in 2024. This annual tradition is a roundup of tips…

I’m loving BBC Football‘s new ‘Advanced match stats’ that have rolled out in the last couple of weeks. As someone who’s always turned to the BBC Football website and app…

My new Excel Christmas long-sleeved T-shirt arrived today, and I couldn’t wait to try it on! Here it is… If you’re an Excel longtimer, you will have inevitably faced the…

I’m not sure how proficient Mr Trump is at Excel, but I just discovered something bound to pique his interest… 🇺🇸🇲🇽 In the ribbon border dropdown on the Home tab…

Today, it suddenly dawned on me that Office Scripts has been around for five years. After being announced at the Microsoft Ignite Conference in November 2019, it was reasonable to…

Sky Sports has been going crazy with Manchester United-related content over the past couple of days. That’s because Sporting Lisbon boss Ruben Amorim is highly likely to become the new…

Prediction: Excel will get a new logo next year. On Monday (30 September), Excel celebrated its 39th birthday. This means it’s just one year off the big four-zero. If that…

I see a lot of people moaning about tethered bottle caps. Understandably so — they’re annoying. Not just for drinking either, despite our poor noses being used to take a…

Whilst reading an article about England’s 2–0 win against the Irish yesterday, I came across a couple of charts I’ve not seen the BBC use before. Gauge charts — aka…

Hurray! The new Premier League season got underway on Friday. In the sole evening match, Manchester United beat Fulham thanks to summer signing Joshua Zirkzee’s 87th-minute winner. Three points, a…

Apparently, I’ve been pronouncing the ‘365’ in Microsoft 365 incorrectly. Ever since the advent of its predecessor, Office 365, I’ve always said ‘three six five’ without thinking. And yet, hearing…

Alarm clocks — who uses one anymore? I’m talking about the dedicated kind — not the virtual one on your smartphone. Last night, I built a quick alarm clock in…

Here’s something I thought was rather clever from Innocent Drinks. It fooled me when I first saw ‘Image not found’, as I thought it was a genuine error. Then I…

I have some celebratory news blended in with a rant… Today, I phoned up the Student Loans Company and paid off my entire student loan debt — the remaining balance…

Back in December 2021, How Fast is Fast Data Load in Power Query? demonstrated how long it took to load varying-sized datasets into the Data Model with and without Power…

It’s interesting how many events have been gatecrashed by England matches at Euro 2024. Whether it’s… ⚽️ The Killers concert ⚽️ Kings of Leon concert ⚽️ Theatre play ⚽️ Wimbledon…

Here’s a chart Excel needs: a cartogram. It’s a type of map that represents geographic regions with shapes sized according to a specific data variable rather than their land area,…

In Excel for Mac, when you select a range of values and then press Backspace, they are all cleared. The same behaviour occurs in Excel for Web. However, in Excel…

Structured references are often preferred to cell references because they add a dose of readability and memorability. Let’s be honest, you’d rather see tblEmployees[Name] than A2:A11, wouldn’t you? A few…

Like many others, I got caught out recently by Adobe‘s sneaky terms and conditions. Firstly, there has been a sudden bump in price: £16.24 to £28.99 a month for my…

Spreadsheets and music? Not exactly a match made in heaven — so you thought. Wrong. Check out this awesome Spotify B2B campaign video called ‘Spreadbeats’, a creative and colourful animation…

Spent about half an hour playing about with Sheets’ new table feature. Predictably, it is comprehensively inferior to Excel’s, and the things we take for granted are not as intuitive.…

Last Thursday (30/05/2024), Jeremy Vine was joined by two guests on his BBC Radio 2 afternoon show. They were Giles Male, co-founder of Full Stack Modeller, and Harry Matthews, Group…

Get Data and Get data are two prominent UI buttons found on Excel’s Data tab and Power BI’s Home tab, respectively. Both have the same icon, and both serve the…

Ever heard of ‘marching ants’? Although it’s not the most commonly used term in the Excel lexicon, it is more prevalent in graphic design. In software like Photoshop, marching ants…

The current Excel logo was introduced in 2019, making it already half a decade old! On the Windows desktop version, you’ll see it in several places, most notably as the…

Let’s talk emojis. Just like we’re all familiar with colour televisions, we’re also familiar with these colourful glyphs. Their primary purpose is to allow us to convey emotional nuances that…

How many worksheets can a workbook support in Excel? According to the ‘Excel specifications and limits’ webpage, the total number of sheets permissible is ‘limited by available memory’. What does…

Oh, dear. We’ve been here before, haven’t we? 😫 F1 is a sport that requires a colossal amount of attention to detail. Ultimately, a team’s aim is to construct the…

Excel’s decimal buttons are a thing of mystery. Sat snugly in the centre of the Home tab, they provide a quick and convenient way to adjust the number of decimal…

At the backend of last year, I was honoured to be asked by Microsoft MVP John Michaloudis to participate in his podcast, The Best Microsoft Excel Tips & Tricks in…

Does anybody remember Nelly’s 2002 hit ‘Dilemma’ ft. Kelly Rowland? Was that really twenty-two years ago?! 😳 Having amassed an astonishing 1.5B+ views and 8M+ likes, it’s one of the…

It was only last year when I first realised that LinkedIn had a copyright infringement issue after discovering a slew of users regularly publishing popular Instagram and TikTok videos as fresh uploads…

LED status lights — why are they so annoying at night? Whether it’s televisions, computers, game consoles, USB hubs or WiFi extenders — you name it — it’s very common…

Days like today don’t come around very often, so it’s an appropriate time to remind everyone of the dreaded ‘leap year bug’. What is the ‘leap year bug’? Ever since…

Have a look at these Excel buttons: What do you notice? That’s right. Inconsistency. For two of them, the negative action is on the left side and the positive on…

I’ve been to all four Global Excel Summits now, stretching back to the inaugural edition in 2021. I wasn’t an employee for the first two. However, I was delighted to become…

Switching a cell reference from relative to absolute is ideal when you don’t want it shifting in a formula after you copy and paste elsewhere or use the fill handle…

Quick gripe to start the morning with: pillows. It doesn’t seem to matter whether I’m in a budget Travelodge or an expensive hotel in West London — the pillows are…

Excel has options allowing you to restrict cell entry so data is kept accurate and consistent. The Data Validation button is found on the Data tab. Selecting it brings up…

In a new Excel worksheet, I enter this formula in A1: After waiting 12 seconds, a spilled sequence is generated from 1 in A1 to 53673984 in XFD3276. XFD is…

English is an ever-evolving language, with most dictionaries welcoming 500–1,500 new words every year. The job of a lexicographer is to compile dictionaries, adding and editing entries as they monitor…

Excel has limits — plenty of them. Whether it’s the number of worksheet rows, characters in a cell, or the percentage you can zoom in. We’ve all bumped into a…

Just an outrageous idea I’m mooting… Ever since Excel burst onto the scene, it’s been based on a worksheet grid. Each cell in that grid accepts either a formula or…

Who knew Excel spreadsheets could produce such exhilaration and palpable tension among competitors and crowds alike? Well, there certainly was at the Microsoft Excel World Championship 2023, which took place…

Want to crash Excel? Of course you do, and there’s a concoction of things you can do to cause one (and frustration). Reference the same range in GROUPBY’s row_fields and…

Yippee! 🥳 Excel finally has a date picker 📅 — imitating another Google Sheets feature — except going above and beyond to ensure it’s a cut above. At the moment,…

Cambridge Dictionary (CD) has named ‘hallucinate’ as Word of the Year. No, not to celebrate a surge in psychoactive substance usage, which causes users to see, hear, feel, or smell…

The announcement of eta lambda support has further simplified the summing of columns. When the BYCOL function was released, I was impressed that we finally had a solution that didn’t…

Web scraping in Excel has just got better. If you’ve ever used the Get Data From Web tool, you’ll know how limited it was. After pasting a URL and clicking…

On Sky Sports yesterday, Jamie Carragher was absolutely right when he said Manchester United play “underdog football” after our 3–0 drubbing to Manchester City. I know that possession isn’t everything, but every…

Enjoyed your extra hour in bed today? 🛌 😴 That’s right. Across Europe, clocks went back 60 minutes at 01:00 UTC (Coordinated Universal Time). In the UK, we moved into…

One stealthy arrival to Excel recently is a Workbook Links button in the Data tab to replace the old Edit Links. Clicking it now unveils a pane to manage links…

The Rugby World Cup has got to be the most dragged-out sporting tournament around. It’s taken 36 days to go from the opening pool match — when hosts France defeated…

Checkboxes have never been Excel’s biggest strength because: 👎 They cannot sit in cells.👎 They cannot be resized.👎 They cannot be coloured.👎 They are only compatible with desktop versions.👎 They are…

We’re only 3¾ years into this decade, yet we’ve already seen game-changer after game-changer come to Excel. Next on the conveyor belt is Copilot, which will be made generally available…

Excel has a vast range of keyboard shortcuts, and there have been a few added to the list over the years. New ones introduced include: However, I’m sure there’s a…

Excel’s border styles help us enhance the structure and readability of our worksheets. Thick, thin, dotted and dashed — there are 13 variations to choose from in the Format Cells…

Two weeks ago, the bombshell news about Python integration coming to Excel was greeted with rip-roaring excitement. The secret had been well-kept by tight-lipped Microsoft MVPs, who were finally able…

Sometimes data is perfectly shaped and structured — other times, it’s not. If you’ve used pivot tables, you’ll be familiar with the cross-tabular format, which summarises data based on two…

I’ve long been aware of the practice, but up until a few weeks ago, I didn’t have a scoobies what LinkedIn pods are. You might not either, so here’s a…

It’s fair to say the monitor market has been pretty stagnant for a while, but I did snap up a 40″ ultrawide monitor a week or so ago (LG 40WP95CP-W.AEK).…

Dear, oh dear. Looks like hundreds of thousands of Twitter (sorry, X) subscribers need a maths lesson. World of Statistics put out a poll a couple of days ago with…