Excel Hour - Learn to Excel with The FP&A Guy

Foreign. Welcome. Welcome to anyone else who's out there. We'll get started in a couple minutes. Just let me know where you're coming from in the chat and we will start here at the top of the hour. Where are you coming from, Wayne? Remind me where you're located. And today I have my shirt. Same sheet, different day. San Diego. I bet it's nice and sunny. Welcome Jamal from Kenya. Exotic New Jersey. Not just New Jersey, but exotic New Jersey. I heard some report yesterday that ranked New Jersey is the third best state in the country to live in. Have no idea what the requirements were. I just heard it on the radio. So there you go. Alexi, you live in the number three state according to somebody. All right, we'll give it another minute or two here. Welcome Deanna from Plano. Let me. There we go. Welcome Lewis from Boston. We got Tracy from Sacramento. Great. Looks like we got a good audience out there. We got several people joining us. I can see some are in Streamyard, some in LinkedIn or maybe some of you out YouTube. So. So Aaron, I'm glad you love the beard. I like it too. Let's should start with an Excel joke, but let's see if I can think of one. We're coming up on budget season. Does anybody know why the spreadsheet was constipated? We'll give it a second, see if I get any answers. So the question is, does anyone know why the spreadsheet was constipated? The reason is because it couldn't budget. Hahaha. I didn't say the humor would be good here. So. Alrighty. So I'm going to go ahead and get started here. If any of you haven't downloaded the Excel file, you can go to my website and download it there. Or if you take an image of the QR code here, you can also download it. Welcome Elvis from Ghana. Great to have you. So, just a little bit about myself. So my name is Paul Barnhurst. You can see business the FPA guy. I'm wearing the hat. That's the name I go by. I have three podcasts, FP and a Tomorrow Future Finance that I co host with Glenn Hopper and Financial Modelers Corner. I'm also fortunate enough to be a Microsoft mvp. I love to hike. Here's a picture of my beautiful wife with the fish with my daughter located in Salt Lake City. There's beautiful downtown Salt Lake. I'm a little ways from there, but I grew up very close to there. That was kind of the picture I got to see regularly and I love running and I have a mic because I love podcasts and talking. Welcome Andreas from Los Angeles. Looks like we have a great turnout, so I want to cover a few things today. You know the so first we're going to talk about we're going to talk about cleaning your data. Often you'll get files with messy data, difference between text and numbers, and more. Just some simple formula function tips and tricks to clean your data when your vlookups and your index matches don't work. Some of the A lot of this can also be done in Power Query. We won't focus on that today, but it will be some different ways to deal with your data and to share some tips, tricks and common things I've seen that often cause issues. Then we're going to spend a few minutes on shortcuts and I'll share a few tips and tricks on learning shortcuts. We'll do some things in the file we may talk and then we're going to talk about some of the exciting new AI tools. And I'm just going to share some of the tools that are out there and what I'm seeing still very early in going through them. But we're making some pretty rapid progress and I think in the next 18 to 24 months for many of us, some it may have already, but for many of us, the way we work in Excel is going to change substantially. Going to be much more having the AI integrated into our workflows, into our tools and using it as we go and having it build things for us, it's really, it's pretty incredible. So I for one am very excited for kind of where we're heading and then we'll wrap up with some key takeaways. So we're going to go ahead and jump into Excel now and you guys should have a file called Formatting Shortcuts and Help Master File. I'll be working off the our student file. I'll be working off the master file because there are a few places where I'm going to ask you to do exercises because I'm a big believer that's the best way to learn. I don't want to sit here and lecture for an hour. Not, not the most fun. So the first thing I want to get into is this is just more what you'd almost call an announcement. The first thing I like to say when it comes to formatting. If you look out there at like Wall Street Prep, Wall street, mojo, corporate finances to some of the biggest finance training organizations in the world, you'll see a common theme. All of them recommend. So Mahad, the file comes from my website. I shared that QR code at the beginning. You can also go to the FPNA guy. Check. Click on the Excel section on my menu and it's the first button there to download it. All righty. So if you look here at the file, right, almost everybody says look, blues should be inputs. It makes it really easy to understand when you have an input. If it's a calculation, any kind of formula function, it should be calculations. References to other sheets should be green. And then most will say, look, if you're going to reference other files or external links, use red. I would say try if at all possible, not to do external links to other workbooks. I've done it before, but it's usually a headache. And then you can see one of them had mentioned, hey, links to data providers, dark red. And so those are some common formats. Also, let's just say you want to use Excel. Excel has its own built in color coding. I don't know how many people know this, but if you come to home and you click right, sorry, let me enlarge that right here under styles. You can see it has a color for calculated, for checks, for outputs, for links, for hyperlinks, for inputs. You could also set your own custom styles if you want. So the reality is there's not a, there's, there's not a good reason at this point to not be using color coding in your files. It makes everybody's life easier. So that's the first thing I'm going to say about formatting. And then, you know, here's just a simple example where you could see, depending on what it is, hey, this was an input, this was a formula. So it's blue, it's black. This was linked to a different sheet, so it's green. And you can quickly look at this and start to distinguish where different stuff is coming from in, in the model. So, okay, I could tell these are all assumptions. I can manually adjust these. This is assumption. And then this is a formula. And I could see, okay, if I adjust this, that adjusts. So that's the first thing I'll say of general formatting is please just do everybody a favor, use color coding. And even if you don't use one of them I mentioned, you use something different, your company likes something different. Make sure you put a sheet at the beginning of your workbook. Just telling people what color is what so they know. Because some people like to do something similar to this for an input where you maybe you put a yellow or an orange kind of a background behind it, and then you do a blue number. Some people might put a border around it, depending on, you know, hey, is it an assumption I input? Is it something I want somebody else to input? All right, so that's it. On formatting. I want to get into what I call blank blank cells. And what I want to show is I'm just going to do one thing here, and we'll walk through them. I didn't realize I hadn't fixed one thing. So give me one second, all right? All right. So if you look at these, every single one of these look blank. There's really five different situations that can appear blank, and only one of them is a true blank. And the way I can tell is I have the length formula right here where it's counting the length of each of these. And so I can see that the only one that has no length is this one here. That's a true blank. It shows a length of zero, means nothing's truly in the cell. First one, all it is, is spaces, right? So I could put spaces in something. It will appear blank, but Excel will let me know. No, there are four characters in that cell. That's the first situation. The second, which I would say you should never do, is turn the font white, right? If I turn it back black, there it goes. So second one is, sometimes you have somebody put white font because they want to hide a number. The third situation that appears blank but isn't is you can see 10,000, and in here is what's called custom number formatting. And I wish there was a way to enlarge this dialog box. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to copy out what I have so you can see it, and I'm going to make this bigger. So what you're going to notice here is in the custom dialog box, I put three semicolons. What happens is the first semicolon is what do you want your number to be if it's positive? Second one is, what do you want it to be if it's negative? And the third semicolon is for text. And by putting nothing in there, just strictly the semicolons, it basically displays nothing. So even though there's a number there, it shows up similar to if I had, you know, made it all white. But in this case, it isn't white. Right, it's black. You can see I changed the font to black. But because the custom number formatting overrides that it won't show up. So if I go in and change the custom number formatting now, my number shows up and I could tell something was there because I could see the number of characters here. I could see the length. The next one is there are several non printable characters, and we'll talk about that a little later. But char144 is an example of a character that's non printable. It shows up as something and it could mess with your vlookup, your X lookup. All your lookups are your formulas, but it does not display in Excel. But it does take up a character length of one. And then the last one is right, just a true blank. I haven't done anything to the cell, right? If I drag this formula down for length, all of these are going to show zero, because there's nothing there. So that's the first kind of example I want to show because we all sometimes run into something where why is, you know, why is that number not showing up? Why. Why does it appear blank to me, but it's not. So those are the only five I could come up with. If somebody knows of another one, I'd love to hear it. Next is number versus text. So I have three columns here. The numbers in each of these are 1 through 10. But notice if I ask, hey, is column B equal to column C? Comes back false, it says no. And in a minute here, we'll have some exercises for you guys to do. I just want to lay some groundwork. So that's the first. Now, if I compare column two to column three, or sorry, column one to column three, you can see it comes back as true. So what you're going to notice is notice this column's right aligned. This column is right aligned. This column is left aligned. So what happens is, if it's a true number, it's by default right aligned. If I make it a text, sorry, let me out of line. All right, let me do this. I can put a single quote in front of it and it'll make a text. There are other ways which we'll walk through. But what you can see here, right, is you can see that's a true number. It's on the right side. That's text, that's on the the left side. So whenever I ask if they're equal to each other or try to do any kind of lookup, they are going to. They're not gonna find each other. So if you have a list with lookups where in one case it's text and the Other is a number. You're not gonna find any matches, even though they look the same to you. Right. If I shrink this down to size like that, you really can't tell they're different. Right. I could have them overlapped on each other, even though one's text, one's numbers. Okay, so now let's talk about how do I convert text to a number? You can also do the opposite. But most of the time, what you're wanting to do is you're wanting to take text and convert it to a number. I'm going to change this one back. So what we have is there's five methods, and I'm going to have you guys practice the methods with me. So I'm going to delete this and I want you to follow along. So the first method is two different versions of the same method. Any math operation will convert text to a number. I remember when I first used Excel, every so often I'd see somebody who had put a double negative in front of a number, and I never understood it for the longest time. It's probably a decade before I understood it. And what all they're doing is they're converting it from text to a number by performing a math operation. A double negative equals a positive. So it doesn't change the number, but it does perform a math operation. Next one is I can do this times one, right? Anything, any number times one is the number. Again, doesn't change the number, but converts it to a number. Next, there's two formulas you could do, number value, if you wanted. I find the math operations are usually easiest for me, probably because that's how I learn. But you can also use the number value formula. And you can use the value formula. So now you've seen all of those, have converted what is text to a number. Next is you can come up here to the data ribbon. You can click text to columns, click finish, and it will convert that text to a number. So I could highlight this whole range and do it with all these if I wanted. If I just go text to columns, finish, you can see it converted all but this first one because I have an equals, and I put it as a double quote. So it won't convert that one because it's a formula, not a number or not text. But you get the idea. All right, so let's just walk through an example here of kind of what we're seeing and what happens. So here I have a bunch of numbers I want to match to the number nine. I do a simple Vlookup I could do an xlookup, an index match, it doesn't matter, right? Whatever lookup you want. I write a basic lookup saying, hey, look up seed number nine in B3 through D14, return the number two, and I get an N A. I get an error. So there's a couple ways I can overcome it. What I know is I know this is left aligned, so this is text. So what I can do is I could say vlookup, and I know the other's right aligned, so I know it's a number. So I could say this here. And I could convert this to text if I wanted by putting an ampersand and a double quote. Then I can highlight all this and say, give me column two. That will work. So you could do two things. You could either convert your lookup value or you can convert all your data. If I did this as an xlookup, I would convert my data. What I would have done, because I can break the columns apart, is I would say, okay, here's my lookup value. And then I would have said, here is my lookup array. And I put the double negative. So perform the math operation. And I said, okay, here's my return array, and it works. I always recommend changing it at the source, but you can also just manipulate it in your formula. If it's quick and dirty, you just need a quick answer. You're not going to use the data again, you know, for whatever reason. But as a general rule, always try to fix the data where it sits and then also back at whatever the data source is, you don't have the problem every single time you work with your data. All right, so that's text to number. The next is the trim formula. So we've all dealt with it, where you get, you know, things with spaces. So you'll notice I have several spaces here. This one, I have some spaces in the front. This one, I have some spaces in the back. You can see what the length of each of these are. 19, 8, 10. And then let. If I do a trim form function, which you guys can copy here with me, what the trim does is the trim trim spaces from three places. Anything before the first word, anything in between words, more than one space, and all spaces at the end. So you could see a trim. Five, it trimmed four, you know, here it trimmed nothing because that was proper. But here it trimmed out the spaces in the middle, and so you can quickly see what trim does. I'm going to pause for a minute. Any questions so far? We probably have about another kind of five, ten minutes here. Then we're talking a little bit of shortcuts and then we'll jump into AI, which I'm going to guess everybody's pretty excited about. But any questions so far? I just want to give it a minute or two to see if anyone has questions. And while we're waiting to see if there's any questions, I will tell another Excel joke. Does anyone know what a newborn spreadsheet means? Formula. All right, you're probably like, please move on. I'm not seeing any questions come through, but please, if you have any, go ahead and ask them. Next is clean. And this one's really interesting. Notice all these words here how pretty much every single one of them does not look align correctly. The length on every single one of these shows up as five. Right. You'll notice that if I say trim. So maybe I have spaces. So let's try trimming all of them. Yeah. Samuel, the double negative. All a double negative does. And I showed this earlier, so let's just say I have the. I have something that's text. A double negative is a math operation. It converts it to a number because negative times a negative is the positive. So it is the equivalent of doing six times one. Some people just find a double negative shorter. So all a double negative will do is it will convert anything that's being stored as text value to a number value. All right, so you could see I tried trim and it didn't clean any of these. So trim doesn't work. You know, I could try. Well, what if I put a double negative in front of the list? It's like I can't even perform a math. You know, there's, there's issues with your data basically right. It's coming back with the value error. So it doesn't know how to perform a math operation on them. But what if I try clean and let me get my key my fingers aligned with my keyboard. If you time. If you try clean now, notice shows up as test and I don't know why it's not wanting to spill. Fine, I'll do this a little differently. We'll just do. And drag it down and you can see they're not all the length of 4. So these are all the ASCII characters 2, 9, 10 that are considered non printable characters. You will not see them, but they are there. If I change these, you can see if I change this, they would. I could get them to show up, but they're all here. So. Right. If I look at the length. So again If I do len of this, this out of the way, you can see every single one of those is the length of one, even though they all show up blank. So that's often what happens with a report is you Download something from NetSuite or wherever and for whatever reason it adds a non printable character to all your data and then you're trying to figure out why do my vlookup vlookups not work. So that's the third. So we've covered converting data from a number to a text. We've talked about the trim formula. You have the clean formula. Now I want to show an example, bringing it all together. So we're going to walk through these three and go ahead and follow along with me. We're actually going to do four here. So first I'm going to trim my data and see what happens. So my data is here. You can see it's a length of 7, 5 and 5. If I trim it, it goes to length of 2, 2 and 3. Okay, made progress. What if I do just a clean, so not a trim but just a claim. What happens? So I highlight the three rows. This one goes to one, that becomes two, that becomes three. So you can see same, same length, same thing there, but they're not. You can see, sorry, length. Here you can see 6, 4 and 4. This one went to 2, 2 and 3. So what if I combine clean and trim together. So let's say I trim it and then I clean it. What's my length? Okay, you can see it shows up as length of 1, 1 and 1. But if I do it the reverse order clean trim, I believe it shows up different. See here? Yep. See that one right there? The number three. If I do the trim first and the clean second, it keeps a character. If I do the trim first and the clean second, all of them show one. So the final thing I could do is I can do negative, negative for my math operation. Then clean, then trim, select my data and you can see. There we go. So I've seen some people, I have seen this before, putting this formula around their their data they're matching against just to make sure there are no issues at the two match. All right, so that's all I wanted to kind of share on formatting is those are some tips and tricks I've learned to just help clean up lists. You can also do it in Power Query. You could do vba and there are other ways. All right, so shortcuts I want to start before I go to popular shortcuts. I Want to show what I think is one of the easiest ways to learn shortcuts. And I would hope everybody's aware of it, but if they're not, I'm just going to share it real quick. Is if you press the alt key, you're going to notice and do it on your Excel. A letter comes up for every single one of the menus that are up here. If I press any of those letters, it then brings up more letters for that menu. So right now I pressed review. So I'm in there now. And then I'm just going to hit cuz I want a new comment and it gave me a new comment box. And so if you don't know a shortcut, the easiest way to start using shortcuts is just press the alt key and start getting familiar. You'll also notice at the top you have the numbers 1, 2, 3 and 4. You can add your own custom shortcuts. Up here you can customize your toolbar. So if you customize the ribbon, you can add things to your menu if you want your Quick Access toolbar right here. See I have these four. If I wanted borders, I could add it. If I wanted conditional formatting, you know, whatever it might be. And now notice when I hit alt, it assigns a number to those. So all you have to do is alt 1 or alt 2 or so if there's a command you do all the time and it's lengthy, just create a quick act Quick Access toolbar shortcut for it. Yeah, Samir, you have a question? All right, well, I'm waiting for that to come through. The other thing you'll notice. So let's say, let's see, where's a good example? Let me just come over here. I have a table right here. Notice that's a context specific menu that will also get its own keyboard assigned. Always be in green. So it's a pivot table, a table, a slicer, and there are other context specific menus. Those also get assigned to keyboard. Notice also I have some tabs in here that are not part of Excel. They're add ins I've added. There's one called Carousel, there's ones called Tab AI. They also get assigned a shortcut. So you could even use it for tools that were designed for Excel but not, you know, not from Microsoft. There are some exercises. We're not going to go through them. I'd rather get to the showing some of the AI stuff. But you can see here there's a couple exercises you can practice on your own if you Want. And then I put a list of some of the most popular shortcuts. Different people will, you know, would like to see others in here. But, you know, contrl c contrl v copy, paste, undo, redo, save your work, workbook bolding, italics, underline, know, control A to select everything in an area. You know, control arrows. So some of the alt, enter most common shortcuts. To get you started, there's a list of 25 and there's a sheet on here where you can practice, you know, just doing some of the commands. Like this one says, hey, just practice copy and paste. And you know, use the F2 shortcut to enter in the cell. You can see I'm now in the cell here, or whatever it might be, has a few different ones for you to practice, just to kind of familiarize yourself with them. All right, now let's jump into AI I have here. And I'm, I'm only going to touch on this part for a minute. I want to get into the other. So these are the, probably the majority of what I call general purpose LLMs that are out there. You know, there's seven, there's probably. There's more than seven, but seven I listed here. You have chat GPT, which I know everybody's familiar with, started the craze. You have Microsoft copilot, which uses ChatGPT, but is built on top of it. It also uses Microsoft technology. That one's built into Excel. You know, if I come here, you can see it right there, Copilot. I can click it and it comes up. Then you have Gemini. Gemini also has its own version for Google Sheets. Llama is, is one of the only ones that's open source. You can download it, install it on your computer. Claude Xai, which is Gron, that's Elon Musk's one. You have Deep Seek from China. All of them are going to be similar. All of them are a great way if you need help with a formula, you know, some analysis and different things. But the problem, and this is where things are quickly changing, is outside of Copilot, which I would say was built for the masses, is going to provide the least benefit for the average finance professional because we tend to, you know, use Excel much more than the average. The average user that just, you know, I'd be using it to create a simple list or, you know, groceries or whatever. We're often doing deep analysis and models. Copilot isn't that helpful because it's really designed for the million of people and 900 billion people and 900 know million of them have never created a table type of thing. And so what's happening, and this is why I'll share this next then we'll walk through a few examples is what's happening is more and more tools are building their own add ins and bringing in some kind of LLM model. Some are using Claude, some are using Chat GPT with their own custom instructions and APIs and various pieces of work to, to build the workflow so that you can talk to and have the tool start building graphs, building models, cleaning data for you. And so I'd love to know, just throw in the chat if there's any tools you've tried or any you've heard of, let me know. I'd love, I'd love to know in the chat. And we, I'm going to walk through, you know, the ones that I've seen so far. I what I've done is I've created a list of them and I did learn of a new one today that I haven't added. Somebody found me on Tik Tok and reached out but here's the ones that I think are specific for spreadsheets. And please let me know if you can still hear me. I haven't seen any comments in about 10 minutes. I just want to make sure everybody can still hear me. So somebody could just in the chat let me know. That'd be great. All right, so the first two we talked about before, you have Copilot for Excel, you have Gemini for sheets. Beyond that, the ones I've seen. Perfect. Glad you can hear Lulu. All right, Rosie. So Rosie called, calls itself. Rosie is Chat GPT for Excel. We'll take a look at a few of these. I don't know how many we'll get to, but that's Rosie. Then we have what's called Carousel. Carousel is interesting in that you have to download an installer and install it on your computer versus adding it as an add in. Pretty, pretty interesting, pretty interesting tool. I played with it some today. It was, it's pretty good. So there's Carousel, they're still working on it. It's still, it's still beta, so it is buggy. It is available but it's a beta version. So I've already ran into a few bugs. Perfect. I'm hearing a bunch of people say they can hear me. All right, awesome. All right, Rowan AI, they have a beta that is live and this one's interesting because their focus is meet Rowan, your accounting AI and experience Excel accounting expertise outside the box, you know, seamless workflow, customization. Many of these are more focused on just modeling, but this one talks about modeling but like audit, build, audit, you know, format. So I, I'm excited. That one I haven't had a chance to play with yet. I'm supposed to meet with the team. This one is probably one a lot of you have seen videos of. There is the video saying, hey, it solved the Excel problem. Use case like, sorry, let me do one thing here. It solved an Excel use case like 10 times faster than the average human. There's been a lot of videos for it. So Alexa. Not yet. I haven't seen any good. Yes. Oh, sorry, I thought I said training. Are there any good AI tools for building, updating and checking financial models? So I'll share a little bit here. A shortcut can build a model. Trace Light can build a model. Many of these can build a model. I haven't been able to test them to see how good. Updating models is much harder for almost all the tools because they have to read all your existing data versus creating it themselves. So most of them are better at building models than modifying existing models. They're also good at auditing. I know Chris Riley has ran Rosie AI through his models and you know, the, the things they came up with with corrections were more stylistic where it's a matter of opinion. Not that it was actually wrong, but he was pretty impressed with what he saw. So yes, they're getting better and we'll walk through a few examples. We're not going to try to build a full model here. It could take a while and I, I have more coming on this that will prove in the future. Can't announce anything right now, but working with several experts in the industry to hopefully bring an entire series on all of these, the strengths and weaknesses and understanding them. So stay tuned for the next week or two on LinkedIn. I, I hope to share more on that. It's all I can say at this point. So Shortcut is its own spreadsheet, but you'll notice you it saves them as an XLSX file type. So anything you do here you can then take back into Excel. So it's not trying to be its own spreadsheet. It felt that was the better way to build it due to some of the limitations with Excel, but it's trying to really work seamlessly with Excel. So a little, little more clunky that way. Trace Light. I talked to the founders today. I played with that a little bit. Right there is hey become superhuman. Excel Build with language, discover errors that will talk about building models. Sorry, let me come back. So Celeri has not been released yet. I've met with the founder. They're doing some really cool stuff. It's going to take a while to build it out. Truffle Pig is another. They're an AI native spreadsheet, similar to Shortcut in that way. But I think they're going to try to be their own spreadsheet. But they say they can build models. There's Melder. Melder has written a bunch of custom functions great for PDFs. That's the one area I've seen app. I've seen it work where it pulls out PDFs and it. It's pretty cool. You can use formulas with text to say, hey, I want this field and that. Build and extend things and categorize them. Yeah, I mean, of course it's still early, Alexia. I mean, think about how many steps are involved in building a model. But they, they. Some of them can build them. Modeling and Excel spreadsheets are going to be. If you just want to be able to talk to it and have it do everything. I'm not sure we'll ever fully get there, maybe with AGI, but it's always going to be human in the loop. And I think AI in general should be that. I don't know how many saw the thing yesterday. Chat GPT advised some guy for his diet that he should replace salt with sodium bromide. Well, you know what? Somium sodium bromide is used in a lot of pesticides. Guess who ended up in the hospital three months later with poisoning because he had ingested enough sodium bromide that he had to go to the hospital because he followed the diet advice from Chat GPT. So it's 100% verify everything. All right. And then the last one is Tabs AI. You know, tabs. I. I've had someone who's a modeler, Lance Rubin, say it's the best one he's seen. Yeah. Now, I don't know how many he's tested, but he's been very impressed. I'm meeting with the founder there. So these are the different tools. Let me show you an example or two of just some things with one or two of them. So we'll see how many we can get through. But there you go. There's the list of those. This will get up on my website. Almost all of them have a free version. And then they run anywhere from nothing all the way up to the most expensive I've seen is 300amonth. All right, so let's start with the graph exercise and I'm going to start with tabs AI. And so I was doing this earlier, so you'll see some data here. Got the ask, I got the agent. So is there a way I can clear all this? I don't know, it's fine. All right, so what I'm going to ask it is build. So this is perfect for a waterfall chart, right? You can see 2022 EBITDA, 2023 EBITDA. So beginning and end and then you can see the pieces in between. So I'm going to say build first. I'm just going to start with build a graph and we'll see what happens. Build a graph with the data in cells B6 through C14. And what's nice is this is this one very well could be using chat GPT. I don't remember if it's using Claude or who it's using. Right. I don't have to go out to chat GPT. It's now right in my tool. I'm using the free version right now. I May got a 30 day trial but I'm not. I haven't paid for any of these. Many of them do do better. So it says I'll create a new graph using data. Okay, it read the data. Now I'll create a new chart with this data. I'll position it in a different location so it doesn't overlap with the existing waterfall chart. So see it notice. So that is not what I wanted, but you know, okay, so try this instead of a waterfall. Not not would have been my first choice, but let's ask it to build a waterfall build. Build me a waterfall chart from the data with the total start point in cell C6 and the total endpoint in cell C14. All right, let's see how. And what's interesting is each of them are different. This is tabs AI, Trace light for example, won't create charts right now except for it will, it will do Python to create it. So Right, it created it. So let's take a look. It told me everything it did. And look, it even did green bars for positive, red bars for negative. Now the only thing it didn't get right is you'll notice this one right here, it did not set it as a total. So let's try one more time and say set C14 as a total and let's see if it can do it. It may not get there. I may have to manually do it, but I could also have it remove it remembers what I asked for last time because it didn't show the, the grid lines. This time it didn't show the legend. So it's, it's learning on my account to kind of what I like, right? I mean it isn't perfect right now. I'd make it a little bigger, get rid of the border, change some font, but it will do those things. See, it tells me it's functioning as an end total, but I don't see what it Sundays. Well, Office JS doesn't provide a direct set as total method for waddle. The chart is functioning correctly, see and it's really not. So you could see, you know, here I really would go in and say set as total since it didn't get it right at first. It's using Office JavaScript and it doesn't know how to. It's not finding a command to fix will F. It will fix other things though. So that's one example. Let's take another tool. Let's log out a tab, we're going to log into Rosie and I'm going to ask it same thing. Create a waterfall chart using the data in cells B6 through C14. C6 should be the starting value and be set as a total and C14 should be the ending value set as a total. And the more instruction you provide it, the more clear. The more you chunk it generally the better it's going to do. Sometimes if it's a simple enough command, you can just give it a vague idea and it gets it. Other times it may be way off. So let's just see what happens with this one. And so like I said, all these tools are different. They, there have been some three, definitely some three statement models being built. Probably the philosophies I hear best are the people that saying, hey, these tools are really there to assist you Tabs AI takes that philosophy. Numo some of the others try to take the philosophy of we can build anything and you know, oversell it is my opinion. And so I think there's definitely a, a line between, you know, what really can be done and what's being sold as hype. So again you could see this one kind of suffered from the same problem. I tried it multiple times, different ones. I've had some I've been able to get that second total set, some I haven't. But still that's. I didn't have to do it right. It got me started. So there's another example. Let's take the second one in here. I'm just Going to ask it to, to analyze this data set and create graphs for the data. So we've done this time I'll ask Trace Light because I think you'll find this interesting. So please analyze the data in cells B4 to D12 and provide some summary statistics and create a graph that will help me understand the data. So this time I'm going to leave it to it to interpret. Let's just see what happens and I'd love to know are there any, if any of you are seeing any cool Excel add ins that you've been really impressed with? Let me know in the chat. Would love to know. So it says hey, I've analyzed the data to understand it. Now I am analyze the data and create visualizations along with summary statistics. You can see it's thinking and what's interesting is this one here is designed to write Python. The other ones are using the office, the JavaScript office scripts to actually create the functions using native Excel. Here all the graphs are created using Python and so you can see the, the difference, you know, approaches Everybody is taking. One of them right now will say look, I can't, I can't use, I think it's Trace, it's Trace Light at the moment. It's like I can write formulas, I can write functions but I can't modify, I can't create pivot charts charts. So they haven't added that capability. Hopefully it'll finish here in a minute. But the reason I share this is, is these two, these tools are rapidly improving. I think there's many of them that can help us in our day to day. Yeah it's all a question of what each, each company, what can get approved, cost, all those things go into it. But there are people who are using them, you know, throughout the day. So he serious. See here there's the analysis. It built and so created four Python charts and I'd have to copy and paste these Students versus teachers by course then it gave me a student to teacher ratio. I would have loved to see a line across to see what the average is. I'm sure I could ask it to do did a distribution and then it did relationship and it gave me the formula for the line. Yeah, okay. And then it gave me the key statistics. I would have rather had them put that in Excel. So see my biggest concern with this one as an example is Trace light is so much of it is done in, in the sidebar versus hey, you know, do it in Excel. I would like you to use Excel. So there's another example I'm sure you know things will change with time and I. Etc. All right, so the third one I want to show here is I have this data table. I want to return the SKU name here. And so I don't. I can't remember my lookup formulas I suck at. Right. So I'm going to come over here. We'll just use Rosie for this one. I'm going to highlight this. Please provide the SKU name from the data table in cells. And I always like to give it the range versus just the name. Just to be explicit. Please provide the SKU name from the data table in cell E5 through F15 in cells C5 through C15 by looking up the SKU number in cells B5 through should have been 14. So let me fix that. I think I said 15. 14. Oh one's 14. One is 15. Okay, there we go. And let's just see how it does. I've tested this before and it's got it right. But just remember, every time something could change in the underlying model, something could change in the way you word your prompt. So just because they got it exactly right the last time does not always mean it will get it right the next time. In general, it should, obviously, but sometimes you may get slight differences. So we'll see. Right now says error when making changes. So it's trying to work through that. You can see it thinking. And there we go. Got the SKU name. So you can see right here it wrote a. It. It wrote a xlookup. Now notice it hardcoded these. It didn't reference the table. Now I could, which is a problem in this sense. What if I add 1011 widget 11 right. Because. And then if I added 1011 here, actually notice it was smart enough to adjust it. I didn't think it would. So it's. It automatically adjusted it. So if I add 1012 and you can see it then adjust. Even though the formula doesn't reference the table object, it is smart enough to pick up when you add data to the table and change the range. I'm impressed with that. That's pretty cool. So there's just a couple examples. Obviously I could do it with these different tools. There's also Carousel here, which I could try it with. You know, Carousel has its chat. I could, you know, ask it to do something similar and see how it does. I'm going to pause here and before we wrap up any questions, I'll just give it a minute or two for questions and I'm Going to go ahead and wrap up. Like I said, I hope to have more coming on this soon and I hope to put the list of these tools on my website soon for people who want to research them and, you know, see what's out there. All right, I'm just gonna wait a minute or two, see if there's any questions. In the meantime, I'm gonna go back to. All right, fine. Let me get rid of my comment. All right, bring up PowerPoint. All righty. I'm not, not seeing any questions yet. Could be a little bit of delay. Could be. Nobody has any. Brian S. What's the top AI feature I would like to see added? Honestly, I don't know yet, Brian. I haven't done enough testing. It's going to be different by Tool Trace Light. I'm, I'm excited to. When they add the ability to work with pivot charts and, and T table objects and things like that. You know, co pilot in general, I just want it to be smarter. I do like that you can use Python with it. So I don't, I don't know that there's a certain thing I want yet. I just haven't got far enough along in the testing. I hope I have a much more detailed answer to that in about a, a month or two here because I'm hoping to run all of these through a number of scenarios and use cases to really see kind of where, where the shortfall is. I mean, ideally I'd love to see AI that just knows what I'm thinking and builds it, but not realistic. All right, so last, I just want to share, you know, so I have two, two courses that I offer and if you use the code webinar, you'll get 30 off either of them. First, I have an Excel course. This covers Excel tables, Power Query, dynamic arrays. If there's enough interest here, in a few months I may create a, a course on really how to use some of these AI tools within Excel. I may pick one and show, you know, kind of how to, how to get the most out of it. That, that is something I'm considering, but for the moment I have one that covers Excel tables. Like I said, Power Query and dynamic raised about five hours long. It's the same content that's used in the Wharton Online FP and a certificate I created it for that program. So you're getting the same, same material there for those sections. And then the second one is I do have an ultimate course bundle. It includes all the Excel a modeling, design, course, data analysis and business partnering. That's about 10 hours of content, video plus all the exercises and training. The code for that one is webinar. Again it's 129 and use the code, you'll get 30 off. So that's a little bit there. I thank you guys for joining. The other thing. I'll let you know if you have not joined. I would love for you to join my community. It's free. It's the, it's the FPA Hub community. We have over 1500 members in the community. It's 100 absolutely free. So please join the FPA. The FPA Hub.com would love to see you in there. I post pretty regularly and we have a lot of great events. Many of my events have moved there that I may have done other places before. And looks like we have three, four minutes left. So I'll just open it up to any other questions that anyone might have. You're welcome Wayne. You're welcome Alexi. I hope you guys found it helpful. I know some of it wasn't as hands on as normal, but I think we're all figuring out AI as we go. You're welcome Lulu. You are welcome Deanna. Kimberly. So I'll just hang out here for till the top of the hour there. So if there's any other questions I can answer them and I'm going to stop sharing my screen. You're welcome Andrus. And remember, as you, as you learn Excel, the reason to become better at Excel is not because your boss cares what formula you use. It's all about freeing up your time to be a better business partner. Brian, how do I see it impacting entry level FP and A. It's, it's a great question. I do think companies will hold off on hiring more people. I do think you could see with AI, maybe you get by with a team of three or four, but there's still gonna have to be some entry level. There's still going to be a human in the loop. I think other roles will be created. You know, big companies will have someone in FPA almost like AI automation. So I think big changes. The other thing I think that AI will do in general is it's going to do two things. One, you need to become better at the soft skills. The soft skills are going to become more important and in some ways technical skills, but not the traditional technical skills. How good are you at Excel formulas? More. Do you understand some basic Python? Because you can do very easily with AI a lot of detailed analysis, but you might, you probably need to Know enough to validate that the code's right. Data science, like you can run, you know, seasonal Arima and profit from Facebook and Microsoft's open source machine learning algorithms quite easily now. And so you need to know enough to be able to tweak and understand a little bit going on. You don't got to be a data scientist by any means, but I do think in some ways it's going to force us to be more data technical to get the most out of these tools and to be a lot more efficient. Yeah. So Deanna, if you use any kind of formula, if you use quotes, that it that. Let's see. I'm just trying to think. Let me pull it up real quick. Give me one second here and let's look at an example. Make sure I'm understanding here. So Deanna's example, right. So let's say I do equals and double quotes and then if I come over here, it does show up as a length of zero. Now if I put a space between the quotes, it will show up as one. So it is treating that similar to a blank. But I'm going to guess if I say is blank, probably comes back as false. So I'm not sure what the logic is. I would not. I would say it's not false because there is a formula there. But the formula is saying, hey, the length of this is going to be zero. So Excel's basically saying, hey, you put an equals in front of it. So we already have a formula, so it is not blank. But there is no link because you haven't put anything into your formula. Hopefully that's helpful. And so I mean I, instead of using, if you use double quotes and you need to filter that out or something, that may be what you need to do. Yeah, it's counting those blank cells because if you put a double quote in them, they're not truly blank. The for a pivot table, it's going to count them. I don't. You'd have to have a true blank in there. If you have a blank instead of a double quote, it won't get counted or it shouldn't. You can also, if you use power pivot, you can get a distinct count, but it's going to Count it as one. So let's just say there's 50 of them. It's still going to count. Count one of them. I get it's for a nested formula, but I don't know a way to get around that. You could try is na and see if it counts. I don't think it will count the na in your pivot table. So. So let's say I have an N A. I have a 1, 2, a 3, data foreign. Let's see. Insert pivot table. I'm pretty sure it's going to count it anyway because I think how it counts, if I'm not mistaken and I shouldn't have set it right there. Let me undo that. Oh, actually, no, that was fine. Let me. Oops. Control Y. There we go. All right, so let's just put the data down here in the values. Yeah, it's going to do a count of four because it's doing a count. A count day is going to put up, pick up text or number. There's nothing you can do about that. It within your pivot table, you'd have to. You could create a second column that says, hey, if that cell is blank, I'm just having to think about it. You'd want it to return. No, because it's going to show up. I'd have to think about a good way to do that. I haven't ran into that in a formula, so I'm not sure what the answer is, but yes, it's going to count them. So you would either have to write some kind of custom formula or use power pivot and write some DAX to ignore all those. Probably the easiest way is power pivot. You could ask one of the AI tools. So load it to a power pivot pivot table. So let's run through the data model and have DAX filter out the blanks. When it does account, that's probably the best way to do it. I can't think of a simple way with the pivot table, but there are people much smarter than me and you could always try asking on Excel. I'm sure somebody has a solution. I just can't think of one. But I have to jump. I do have another call, so thank you everyone. Good luck and take care. Brian, how do I see it impacting entry level fpa? It's a great question. I do think companies will hold off on hiring more people. I do think you could see.