Excel & AI: Time-Saving Hacks for Faster Spreadsheets

This hands-on, fast-paced session explores practical techniques for making everyday Excel work faster, simpler, and more reliable. Participants will work with modern Excel tools and functions alongside generative AI to tackle real spreadsheet challenges including formula building, data cleanup, troubleshooting, and quick analysis.

Whether you spend time wrestling with formulas or managing messy data, this course offers approaches to help you work with greater confidence and less effort. No prior AI experience is needed, just a basic familiarity with Excel.

Learners will have the opportunity to:
1. Practice faster navigation, selection, editing, and keyboard shortcuts for common spreadsheet tasks
2. Explore modern Excel tools such as Tables and dynamic arrays for more structured, reliable work
3. Build and modify formulas across common use cases, including logic, lookups, text cleanup, dates and times, rounding, and error handling
4. Work with generative AI to turn a messy requirement into an Excel-ready formula
5. Use AI-assisted techniques to debug, explain, and simplify formulas
6. Experiment with efficient methods for cleaning and standardizing messy data, including AI-assisted steps
7. Practice generating quick analysis ideas, summaries, and next steps from a dataset
8. Explore prompt patterns that produce reliable Excel-ready output such as formulas, steps, and explanations
9. Create a personalized shortcut and prompt reference to take away after class
 

Topics:
- Excel productivity fundamentals: navigation, selection, editing, Fill/Flash Fill, Paste Special, and high-impact keyboard shortcuts
- Smarter spreadsheet structure: Tables, consistent formatting, named ranges and structured references, and workbook organization
- Modern Excel features: dynamic arrays and newer functions including XLOOKUP, FILTER, SORT, UNIQUE, TEXTAFTER/TEXTSPLIT, LET, and REGEXREPLACE
- Faster formula building with AI: approaches to parsing text, lookups, conditional logic, text cleanup, dates and times, rounding, and error handling
- Cleaning and preparing data: quick cleanup techniques alongside AI-assisted steps for reshaping and standardizing messy data
- Quick summaries and insights: sorting and filtering, PivotTables, and simple visuals
- GenAI with Excel workflows: prompt patterns to generate formulas, explain results, suggest approaches, and create step-by-step solutions
- Debugging and validation: using AI to troubleshoot errors and a checklist to verify outputs