Basic Excel Skills for Accountants – Part 2 (Advanced)

Excel expert David Ringstrom, CPA, explains helpful ways you can improve the integrity of your spreadsheets. The presentation leads off with disaster recovery techniques, followed by using lookup functions such as VLOOKUP, MATCH/INDEX, and XLOOKUP. The presentation then moves on to using Power Query to automate report clean-up and analysis, and then finishes out with using Excel’s Solver feature to identify two or more transaction amounts that add up to a specific total.

Ringstrom demonstrates every technique at least twice: first, on a PowerPoint slide with numbered steps, and second, in the subscription-based Microsoft 365 (formerly Office 365) version of Excel. David draws your attention to any differences in the older versions of Excel (2021, 2019, 2016 and earlier) during the presentation as well as in his detailed handouts. David also provides an Excel workbook that includes most of the examples he uses during the webcast.

Microsoft 365 is a subscription-based product that provides new feature updates as often as monthly. Conversely, the perpetual licensed versions of Excel have feature sets that don’t change. Perpetual licensed versions have year numbers, such as Excel 2021, Excel 2019, and so on.

Covered Topics

• Accessing files closed without saving as well as interim back-ups Excel makes while you’re working in a workbook
• Contrasting the INDEX and MATCH combination to VLOOKUP or HLOOKUP
• Diagnosing #N/A errors that arise when numbers are stored as text or when text contains extraneous spaces
• Enabling a workbook-specific setting that will create an automatic back-up of critical workbooks
• Enabling Excel’s Solver add-in for more complex what-if analyses
• Exploring the XLOOKUP worksheet function in Excel 2021 and Microsoft 365
• Filtering cleaned-up accounts receivable aging report to display only overdue amounts
• Looking up data to the left or right of a given column with XLOOKUP
• Managing data security prompts that may appear when you link external data into Excel spreadsheets
• Matching on two or more columns of criteria at once with XLOOKUP
• Summing results from multiple columns with a single XLOOKUP function nested within a SUM function
• Tweaking Excel’s AutoRecover settings to raise the odds of recovering your work after an Excel crash

Who Should Attend?
Practitioners who can benefit by using a variety of lookup functions to work more efficiently in Excel.

Presenter
David H. Ringstrom, CPA, is an author and nationally recognized instructor who teaches scores of webinars each year. His Excel courses are based on over 25 years of consulting and teaching experience. Ringstrom’s mantra is “Either you work Excel, or it works you,” so he focuses on what he sees users don’t, but should, know about Microsoft Excel. His goal is to empower you to use Excel more effectively. To learn more about Ringstrom, you can view his LinkedIn profile and follow him on Facebook or Twitter (@excelwriter).

Registration Options

• Live Access, 30 Days OnDemand Playback, Presenter Materials and Handouts – $279
• Available Upgrades:
  • 12 Months OnDemand Playback + $110
  • 12 Months OnDemand Playback + CD  + $140
  • Additional Live Access + $85 per person