Overview:
Manually fixing messy accounting reports every single month wastes valuable time and invites costly mistakes. This session introduces you to Excel’s built-in automation engine, designed specifically to take the grunt work out of your monthly close. You will learn how to connect directly to your financial data sources, and clean and combine the data effortlessly without writing a single formula.
Instead of repeating the same tedious data-cleaning steps every month, you will build smart, refreshable processes that update with a single click. We will walk through real-world finance examples, showing you how to stack multiple monthly budget files, handle typical messy data issues, and merge data from other tables automatically.
During the session we will cover:
• Connecting to External Data Sources - Learn how to import data from multiple Excel, CSV, PDF, and other structured files, including automating folder-based reporting.
• Cleaning and Transforming Data - Explore practical steps to reshape data: removing rows, splitting columns, changing data types, unpivoting, and more — all without formulas or VBA.
• Merging and Appending Queries - Combine data from multiple tables, match lists, and stitch together files with ease using the powerful Merge and Append tools.
• Loading to Excel and Beyond - Understand how to send your cleaned data to Excel tables, PivotTables, or the data model for seamless reporting and analysis.
By the end of the session, you'll be equipped to create refreshable data preparation processes for your financial data and will understand why Power Query is an indispensable part of your Excel workflow.