Excel Skills Simplified: Tutorials That Actually Work
If you’ve ever had a column full of messy text like “Invoice123” or “Order: 4589 units” and just wanted the numbers out of it, you’re not alone. Excel doesn’t have one single “extract numbers” button, but there are a few solid ways to get the job done depending on your version of Excel and how your text is structured.
Power Query makes it easy to change column data types in Excel. You can convert text to dates, numbers to text or whole numbers to decimals. This helps your data work correctly in formulas, charts and reports.
Power Query is a simple and reliable way to remove duplicate rows in Excel. It helps you clean data and keep only the unique records you need for analysis.
Power Query makes it easy to split one column into multiple columns. This is useful when your data is stored in one field, such as full names, addresses or product codes.
Encountering the “Excel found unreadable content” error can be quite challenging, especially when you’re working on an important project. This issue typically arises due to corrupted files or incompatible file formats.
To resolve this problem and successfully open your Excel file, follow the steps below:
If you find yourself doing the same cleaning steps every time a file arrives, Power Query can probably do that work for you with a single Refresh click.
In this article we will take a small “dirty” dataset and walk through the classic way of cleaning it with formulas, then show how to rebuild the same logic in Power Query.
Excel now gives you three very different ways to solve most data problems: classic formulas, Power Query and Copilot.
The trick is not to pick a favorite and use it for everything, but to know where each one shines so you do not overcomplicate simple tasks or under‑engineer important ones.
If you have Copilot in Excel and you are still mostly typing formulas by hand, you are leaving a lot of value on the table.
In this guide I will show you a realistic flow where we start with a messy data dump and use a handful of natural‑language prompts to clean it, analyze it and build a quick chart.
In this tutorial we will build a small but useful dashboard: you choose a region from a drop‑down and Excel updates a table and chart automatically.
We will use three modern tools together: FILTER for subsetting data, SORT for ordering it and XLOOKUP for pulling a few summary metrics into neat KPI cards.