Today’s guest for FP&A Today barely needs an introduction. Purna Duggirala (aka, “Chandoo”) is a celebrity in Excel circles. Since 2004, Chandoo has been regularly sharing everything he learns working with Excel training hundreds of finance teams, and had roles including as
Data Lead, Remuneration Modeling & Analytics for the New Zealand government.
The 16-time Microsoft MVP runs Chandoo.org , which aims to “make you awesome in Excel and Power BI” now receives over 250,000 visitors per month from all over the world and his YouTube channel has 750,000 subscribers. His stated goal is “to make you awesome at Excel and Power BI”, and produces the go-to Excel resources from blog posts and videos to full online courses.
- My Excel Journey and Community building
- Skill gaps in FP&A Teams
- Power BI vs Excel vs Python
- Copilot – advantages and limits
- My favorite Excel function
Chandoo’s Free Data analyst course: https://chandoo.org/wp/free-data-analyst-course/
Connect with Chandoo on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/purnaduggirala/
Full Transcript
Glenn Hopper:
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Welcome to fp NA today, I’m your host, Glenn Hopper. Today’s guest hardly needs an introduction to anyone who has ever built a model in Excel, Purna Duggirala better known around the world as Chandoo. The Chief Excel officer is the founder of Chandoo.org, an award-winning Excel and power BI community with more than a hundred thousand members and a YouTube channel that tops over three quarters of a million subscribers. His mission and his own words is simple to make you awesome in Excel and Power bi, a 16 time Microsoft MVP 2009 through 2024, and former consultant Chendu pairs, an MBA from IIM Indoor, with a computer science background to create data-driven solutions for companies and governments alike. From a remuneration analytics for New Zealand’s Public Service Commission to Globe spanning Excel masterclasses. He spent the last two decades turning rows and columns into real world insight and helping the rest of us do the same. Chandoo great to have you on.
Chandoo:
Thank you so much, Glen. It’s been an honor and, uh, yeah, good to talk to you. How are you?
Glenn Hopper:
I’m good. I, I don’t care how many times I say it. I will never be able to, on my first effort, say remuneration <laugh>. It’s like, it’s like a tongue twister to me. I <laugh> remuneration. I saw that word in the bio, and I thought, oh, here we go. It’s <laugh>. You’ve achieved the one name moniker. Whereas like, if I just were Glen Glen sounds like maybe your brother-in-law or a cousin that’s occasionally borrowing money, it’s like gun know Glen by itself just doesn’t, <laugh> doesn’t work. But Chandoo, I, I love it. Uh, and we, and we’ll talk a little bit about, um, your Chandoo.org back in 2004 and all that. I, I feel like most fp and a today listeners know who you are, but for those who don’t, kind of walk us through your journey from, I mean, you started out in computer science, you became the Chief Excel officer, and now you’re this global data visualization influencer. I, I, I love this, this story.
Chandoo:
Yeah. Thank you. So, it all kind of began, uh, with my fascination for computers. Uh, that’s one of the things that kind of prompted me to go for, uh, my undergrad in computers. And I always wanted to understand how technology works, how computers work, and all of that. And one of the big things that was really kicking up and making a lot of waves just as I graduated, uh, from computer science is the web technologies, especially creating websites and all of that. And this was about the year, uh, 2000s. So soon after I got my first job, I, I kind of set up a website on one of the free platforms. So there used to be a platform called Blogspot, which later got acquired by Google. And it is a blogging place where you can kind of set up your own website and, uh, you know, write about what you’re doing.
So for me, it was two proud thing. One, obviously to write about things, but also to understand how websites work and set up my own website. And, uh, about one year after that, I did my management degree, MBA, and during that time, I decided to get my own domain, because again, I was curious. I wanted to know what is the process of getting a domain, you know, how to register it, how to host it, and all of that. So I had my domain and I was basically still writing about all of the personal stuff. So this is the reason why the site is called share.org, uh, simply because the aspirations at that time were very simple. I wanted that to be my site, and hence my name. And my actual name is Purna Duggirala, which is, which is a very long name. And I knew for a fact that nobody would be able to spell it out.
So I had to go for my nickname. Everybody called me Chandoo since ma childhood. So I went with that, and, uh, I had the two O’S in there. It was kind of like a play, uh, with how Google had two O’S in there and all of that, you know, Yahoo had those two o’s. So I figured it’ll be like that. And anyhow, uh, the site was set up and I was still talking about my personal life, like what I was doing in my management degree classes, you know, how I’m parting what sort of wild things I’m up to and all of that. Uh, but when I graduated from MBA, I started working as a business analyst. And this is when really the pivot to Excel happened. So I was using quite a lot of Excel PowerPoint every day as part of that work. And at one point, the block kind of became monotonous.
Like, you know, I would write, like today, I woke up, went to office, came back, woke up, went to office, came back, because when you’re studying, there is a lot happening. But when you are, when you start working, you fall into a routine. So this is when I figured, you know, maybe I should write about things that I’m doing at my work. And one of the things that obviously is Excel. So I wrote about some of the Excel stuff, and, uh, there was really no looking back, like, you know, once I started writing about Excel, more people started reading that website and, um, sending me emails, and it kind of prompt put me on a journey where I was trying to figure out how to learn more, share more as well as grow the audience there. And yeah, fast forward 20 years almost <laugh>, uh, and here we are today.
So that’s kind of like the brief origin point. Uh, what I do these days is, while the website is still quite active, I also have a YouTube channel that is how I create most of my content. I make videos on Excel, power, bi, sql, Python, a little bit of everything. And, uh, I share, uh, what I’m learning, how I use these tools, uh, either for work or for personal stuff, or with the audience all over the world. And, uh, yeah, like my mission says I want people to, uh, be awesome. And I feel like Excel being the number one productivity tool that most people use day to day. If you’re good in it, you unlock new possibilities. People will give you more respect, more responsibility, uh, your work shines because Excel is pretty much showcasing what you’re doing. So I think using Excel and learning Excel is a valuable skill anybody can have. And my mission is to help people do that.
Glenn Hopper:
And thinking about how the medium in which you’re delivering this information, how it’s changed. Because back in 2004, you know, I, I imagine it was your writing and describing something and you’re dropping in screenshots, and maybe you’re, you could put the Excel file that somebody could download a sample of it. But since then, you have YouTube where they, you can actually screen share and you can show exactly what you’re doing and you know, all the, all the technology around the, the way that you can deliver this. And then also, when you first rolled the site out, this was kind of the heyday of blogs where it seemed like, and I, I don’t, certainly your YouTube channel probably has a pretty active commentary on it, but it seemed like on those blogs, it was a lot more one-on-one interaction sort of in the, in the comment section of the blogs. But how has the community and your interaction with your followers, uh, as the medium has changed, how, how has it changed over the last 20 years?
Chandoo:
So, this is a very interesting question. The things that I noticed are, for example, when the blog was at its peak, we would get a ton of comments, but I could see, uh, some names appearing almost daily basis. People would comment every day, because I was writing every day. Uh, and the community was also building up. Uh, a lot of people would latch onto these conversations. They help each other out. Sometimes I would, uh, would, let’s say I would write an article about, uh, some product. I’ll say, this is one of the ways to use it, and someone will ask a question while I’m sleeping, someone else might respond. And that kind of community building was happening, which also prompted me to create a forum because people wanted like an overflow space where they can have their own discussions and all of that. With YouTube, it is a slightly different, still, the community feel is there to a good extent, but also the audience is much more transient in nature.
This is because the way it works is, I’m sure we all have, uh, you know, subscribed to YouTube channels and watch a ton of videos already in live. So let’s say you discover some sort of a video in YouTube because you’re browsing, and YouTube recommended that you should watch this. So you watch that video and, uh, YouTube thinks, oh, you like this kind of content, this creator. So it’ll show you another video by that creator, and one thing leads to another, and after two or three videos, you might subscribe to this channel. This is the natural flow of events on YouTube. So you subscribe, and that is a signal to YouTube saying that you are interested in this person. So from that point onwards, it’ll show that person’s videos for the next few weeks. It won’t show them continuously. It’ll show them for the next few days to test whether your interests are really genuine, and you are still in that phase or not.
And after two or three weeks, or maybe a month or two months, people fall out of that simply because their needs have changed or they’re no longer fascinated by that style of storytelling or whatever. It’s, so we, we all have these channels that we subscribe to hundreds of channels, but we only watch a handful of them at any point. And we kind of fall in and out of love with these creators. Uh, if the creators have a very strong, um, sense of personality or some sort of thing that keeps us drawing them back, drawing us back into them, then we might watch them on a more long-term basis. But otherwise, it’s a short-term nature. So this is what happens with YouTube. Uh, a lot of the people that kind of get into my Arbit are there with me maybe three to six months during the process of their, uh, Excel learning or Power BI learning or something.
They get the sufficient skills and they move out. They either move out to something else in their life, maybe they’re getting married, so now they’re watching wedding channels, or they have a kid, so they’re watching parenting channel, whatever it is, right? So yeah, that is kind of like the difference between the community. So you understand that there is no, or I mean, there are some people who watch My View videos since the very first video I put. I’m not saying there are not, it’s just that with such a large subscriber base, you can be sure that at any point, only a fraction of them are engaging with you, <laugh>.
Glenn Hopper:
Yeah, that makes sense. So you’ve been doing this a while, 20 years, uh, this decade, Excel turns 40, I think, and we’re gonna talk a little bit more about the others too. But you mentioned Python, power, bis equal, all these other tools that we use, but what do you think it is about Excel that still, whether you’re a data scientist, fp and a, you’ve got all these other tools, even if you’re in Python, something keeps Excel at the heart of all this, that it’s still, uh, if I, no matter how complex the problem is, I always feel like excel’s like my grounding point. What do you think it is about the application that that makes it the heart of everything?
Chandoo:
Very relevant question. And also, this is something that most people miss out when they look at Excel. So I’ll, I, my my opinion is Excel is one of the easiest softwares to use. It has maintained its ease. Like how approachability, whether you are a complete newbie who just finished school, or somebody who is working in an organization for 40, 50 years and has got all of this wealth of experience, it appeals to both of them. Like, yes, I can use this. Right? So Excel, because it is, it has got that approachability. Most of us feel comfort around it. It’s like, you know, we just want to hang out and open Excel and then start doing without feeling like lost or anything. To give you an example, I’ve been a co all my life. I’ve done software development. I have used, uh, different kind of, uh, powerful tools for all sorts of things.
And even then, uh, sometimes, uh, one example being Premier Pro, which we can use for editing videos. So as part of my YouTube journey, I started learning how to do video editing. And I, uh, I have been a very proficient editor with other software, and I thought, okay, let’s just learn Premier Pro, because it lets me create different kinds of videos. And I can’t tell you how frustrated I was for like, the first many, many weeks to get a hang of what is going on and how to use that software. Whereas I never felt that with Excel. Like, even the very first time I used Excel, it kind of instinctively made sense to me. I mean, not the very, very first time, because that was when I was, was really small kid, and I couldn’t really understand this grid nature. But once I kind of started working, everything kind of fell in place.
I understood what is the purpose of Excel and how it plays a major role. So because of that, I think we all want to come back to Excel. We, we all want to use it as the first starting point for any big thing. Uh, there is a popular saying, I’m sure many of your audience are familiar with it, which is the number two application for anything in the world is Excel. So you might have a number one thing for something like Salesforce, for Salesforce tracking, but the second one is always Excel. It’s such an amazing software. And I think, uh, with the advent of newer things, it is only growing. Uh, sometimes it can get into that confusing territory, but, uh, it is still amazing how they have been able to obfuscate a lot of complexity and give that, uh, welcome, come here and play with your numbers and data feel every time you open Excel.
Glenn Hopper:
And over the years, I mean, I can’t imagine it, you’ve trained like thousands of finance teams and in pros, and I’ve obvi obviously 20 years with 750,000 subscribers. How many people are seeing this? But I’m thinking more about training at the corporate level. When you step into an fp and a department even today, are there kind of some standard skill gaps that jump out first? Like, because I think about in a finance program, you, you’re using Excel and you kind of figure it out as you go. Mm-hmm. But unless you’re talking to other students, or unless you’re following someone like you, you’re just, you’re, you’re kind of figuring that out on your own. But I’m wondering, when you go into an FP and a department where people are already using Excel, and usually they’re probably pretty good, but are there some skill gaps that jump out? And and how do you, how do you close them when you, when you come in?
Chandoo:
That’s a good question. The things like, I’m gonna reflect on my last training that I did for an fp and a team here in Wellington is one, obviously this is like the cream of Excel users in the organization. If you go to any organization in the world, the finance team, uh, are the ones that are using most Excel, right? So they already have a ton of knowledge, not just individually, but as a team. They process a lot of, uh, patterns and techniques and templates and all sorts of things that they can fall back on, which is amazing. But the downside of that is it also puts you in a comfort position that you feel like you don’t need to learn it anymore. Let’s say your, uh, your finance team implements a brand new, uh, I don’t know, payroll system or bookkeeping system or something else.
Then everybody’s put on this massive training program and roadshows and whatnot that goes on for months on end until all of them are proficient with that new application that the organization has rolled out. Whereas Excel, on the other hand, uh, right now, the way it works is it is continuously changing every month and every quarter they’re adding new features, and sometimes they’re kind of keep churning the pot and adding newer things. But almost no organization says we are gonna empower our people with Excel. Um, because it is so approachable and everybody feel like, oh, Excel, I know it. They kind of stop thinking about it and actively learning. I think that is the first biggest roadblock. But once they overcome the roadblock and they realize that, oh, we need to learn Excel, and they walk into that trying room, I think that is the biggest win already, that they have opened their doors and they’re saying now, okay, let the knowledge come in.
Let us understand what else is there or how others are using. Uh, then you, you start to see the possibilities in terms of the skills gaps itself. The things that I’m noticing these days mainly are, uh, one, because they have got their own ways of doing, they’ve not really looked at what other ways, what better ways of doing things are. This could be, let’s say they’re cleaning a lot of finance data. They might in, uh, use either VBA or some manual techniques or some other formula based techniques, and they’ve never investigated what else has happened in this space. So Power Query comes to my mind every time I present Power Query. There’s basically audible gasps in the room. People are like, what? We can do this right now in Excel? And that is, uh, one of the most surprising things. So Power Query is definitely like the low hanging fruit.
People are not aware of it, and the more people learn about it, the better the day gets. The second thing is, there is also a lot of, uh, kind of like marketing hype around all these BI solutions and everything, uh, especially in the Power bi, but also other spaces. So people falsely think that you do need Power BI to do certain things. For example, you do need Power BI to, uh, do all these additional powerful pivot tables and calculations and all of that. So when I show them that we can actually use Excel to make a power pivot, use Power Query to automate the data collection and then send it to the data model, and Power can do that and kind of automate most of that budget reporting or month end reporting or any of those tasks, and still use Excel for creating visualizations and reports. That is another thing that people, of course, Excel is not secure. So there are some other things that we need to worry. So these are, uh, what I would consider as major skill gaps. There are other things in Excel, but features like Python and all, I feel, feel like they’re there. Um, they’re good to have, but also they’re not really the deal breaker for most, uh, simply because if you’re at that point, you’re already using Python, chances are you do have a Python set up on your computer, you don’t need Excel to use Python.
Glenn Hopper:
Yeah. A couple of follow ons with that. So first off, what I’m, we’ve realized in, as I, I talked to people who are adding to their Excel skills and trying to learn Power BI and use that, doesn’t it seem like Power Query is like the perfect gateway drug <laugh> to get people to move from Excel into Power bi? Once you understand Power Query, it kind of opens up
Chandoo:
Yeah.
Glenn Hopper:
The possibilities with Power bi is that, yeah,
Chandoo:
It is definitely the, the thing that I, I feel people need to also understand is assess the needs correctly. Do you as an organization need this really powerful tool called Power bi, or your reporting and requirements are so simple that they can still be met with Excel and have elegantly provide that, which means lesser cost and lesser headache, uh, less number of software to maintain and train and guide people through and all of that. But yeah, definitely Power Query and, uh, to a greater extent, even Power Pivot are like that entry points into our bi. Once you see that, oh, this is flexible, and now we can move everything online and just put it there and, you know, connect it to other endpoints that opens new doors and new reporting possibilities.
Glenn Hopper:
Yeah, I always think of it like Excel is two dimensional, and once you get into Power Query and Power Pivot and then Power bi, it’s like you get this third dimension and it’s, it starts to make a lot more sense and, and it changes the way you think about data. You mentioned the grid structure in Excel, but it, it sort of expands it to me. That’s the way I picture it. Well pivot in general, but I just picture it moving beyond that. So
Chandoo:
Yeah,
Glenn Hopper:
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My other follow on question to that Python in Excel, I haven’t seen a really good use case where it completely makes sense to me at this point. Like you said, if you’re, if you’re writing Python already, you’re gonna be in your IDE or in your, uh, you know, notebooks or wherever, wherever you’re writing Python and putting it in there. And I wonder, and you would know this better than me, or you have a better idea or opinion of it, do you think that Microsoft putting Python directly in Excel, is this an interim step for when they really get copilot nailed down and it is truly integrated into Excel? Meaning you’re not gonna have to write to Python, you’re just gonna write natural language, you know, whatever your query is, whatever you’re trying to build. And maybe by already having the Python in there, it’s going to, I mean, and, and I know Python and Excel is not like using VPA, it’s different, different use cases for it, but I wonder, I don’t know, are, do you, are you seeing, are there a lot of applications and, and reasons as a, obviously as a power user and someone who’s training on this mm-hmm <affirmative>.
Are you seeing a, a lot of really helpful applications, or does it feel like this kind of interim step?
Chandoo:
I don’t think it was not, it was a deliberate strategy from Python then jumped to copilot because these happened at different points in time when Python was kind of planned and announced. Uh, there is almost no inkling of this AI revolution coming up on the horizon. So people didn’t know, maybe Microsoft had better visibility, but I would still debate that is not like a chess move that they made thinking this is the next thing that is happening and that is how big it is gonna get, because that’s not how, it’s, what I find with Python in Excel is kind of like neither here nor their solution. It doesn’t replace VBA because it can’t interact with Excel’s own object model or other applications like Outlook or Word or PowerPoint that we can automate through VBA in Excel. So it doesn’t offer that flexibility. It’s not full fledged Python, simply because it only supports a handful of libraries and all the code must travel from your computer to the Microsoft Cloud, run there, come back as a result, which in my opinion, kind of takes away the purpose of programming.
The whole purpose of programming and building even notebook style pro programming is that sort of instant check the result, move to the next step kind of a thing. Now you’re adding a third party here, which is a cloud that is somewhere else altogether. You have to go there, run it, come back, which adds unnecessary latency. And that might not be a big issue for one Line code, but if I have got like a 10 step process, by the time I get to 10th Step, this jump might happen nine times for each of those steps, prior steps to see the result in, in my spreadsheet, which is just annoying. And on top of the limitations that what libraries we are allowed to use and whatnot, that’s not how programming works. When you’re programming, you are always thinking, oh, this is a new problem that I encountered.
I must incorporate this additional library or whatever. And suddenly you come to a place where you, you’re not even allowed to use those things because that’s not supported by Python, because that library interacts with your file system or something else. So this all, um, creates a solution, uh, that I found, frankly just to be, uh, kind of like an amusing thing to have in Excel, but not really useful from a practical point. I use Python, but I’m almost, if I’m using it a hundred times, 99.5 times, I’m thinking I’ll go to via code where my notebook is there, or I might go to an online notebook and just do it there. I’m not even thinking, oh, let me open up Excel and do it there. Um, it creates additional issues to the outputs generated. They come in as objects and that, uh, that themselves are there, and they’re not technically in the spreadsheet. They’re hovering on the spreadsheet, and that opens like completely different kind of worms and all of that. And maybe it was kind of like one of the checklist items for them, and they wanted to have it there, uh, as a POC first and then see where the beast will go from there.
Glenn Hopper:
Yeah,
Chandoo:
<laugh>. But, uh, I mean, definitely it opens interesting possibilities, like the visualizations that we couldn’t previously create in Excel. We can make them with Python, certain types of analysis and models and all of that. But like I said, if I’m doing that, chances are I’m already elsewhere and not in Excel.
Glenn Hopper:
Yeah. I always pictured it let me bring my Excel sheet into my Python, not let me drop my Python into Excel. Mm-hmm. But I, it may end up being prescient though, as they do integrate more and more ai, I wanna talk about AI in a minute, but also <laugh>, so Data Rails right now, I don’t know if you’ve seen, they have this whole, uh, new campaign with F Panda. He’s, uh, he’s the, an Excel lover and, uh, basically rebelling against all these, uh, Excel is dead, um, uh, commentaries that we hear every few years. We hear it.
Chandoo:
Mm.
Glenn Hopper:
And since we, you know, we’re just talking about Python and we’re talking about Power bi and we’re, we’re gonna get into AI in a minute, but now that these are all kind of embedded in the grid, I mean, how do you respond when someone asks you or, or, or maybe suggests to you that excels on on the way out?
Chandoo:
I think they need to open their eyes. They need to see that that’s not how the world is. Definitely, Excel is still one of the largest, if not the largest business applications used every day by hundreds of millions of people. Not millions, hundreds of millions. Uh, and it’s only gonna grow. It’s just that there is now more options. And, um, their kind of own products from Microsoft are trying to cannibalize into Excel a little bit. This seems like a, a very silly thing to say, but for example, for a long time, Excel has this green color and power BI has the yellow color. This used to be the color branding that Microsoft went with. Then outta Blue, I think around sometime in 2023 or two, I don’t remember now. Microsoft went and replaced the colors in Power bi with green color. So
Glenn Hopper:
I did not, I’m colorblind. So you’re, so you’re dropping a, a truth bomb on me that I was unaware of.
Chandoo:
So, uh, right now it is kind of now back to neither green nor yellow kind of a color scheme, uh, when I opened Power bi, but they went and they did that. And, uh, part of me as a business person, I, I enjoy branding, and that’s one of the things that I kind of like Deep got deeply passionate about back in my MBA days, and I still continue to look branding and design and all of that. So part of me couldn’t help but think, Hmm, this must have been like a deliberate strategy from somebody internally to see that a majority of would be power users, power BI users are currently Excel users. So if we align ourselves and kind of get into that color space, maybe they’ll start to associate with us. But I don’t know, I’m, I’m just, uh, kind of making it up because I’m not really sure that is the thing or nobody from, but yeah, and definitely if you look at Fabric, fabric also has got that, uh, green color.
So I, I think that alone is another contributor to this factor that people now think, oh, power BI can do all of these things, then should, why should we use Excel? And uh, many times it’s easy to portray Excel as a well, and like, you know, you make a big budgeting booboo and you somehow suddenly lost a billion dollars. What are you gonna blame it on? Human stupidity or process error or simply say, oh, somebody hid a column in Excel and we didn’t see it. Like, you’re managing a billion dollars. You should know you, you should check for co hidden columns and you should trust that the, the somebody better to do this job. So we get all of these things and, uh, that kind of amplifies the message. Uh, but I think, uh, X Excel is still one of the largest applications. And even with the amount of amazing things that we could do with Power BI and all of that, still millions of people every day are looking at all of these BI reports from Tableau, power BI SaaS and whatnot, and always asking the question, where is the Excel export to Excel button?
Simply because the comfort that Excel creates, none of these other tools are able to do. So I think Excel will be here to live where it, it might evolve into a different beast eventually, but it’s good to embrace it rather than try to villainize it and see some other solution, uh, which will be more cumbersome, more tricky to work with and more restrictive.
Glenn Hopper:
It’s funny you mentioned that export to Excel. I’m working with a client right now and redid their dashboard. And when I showed them the dashboard, the export to, we moved where the Export to Excel button is, and the first, like, I hadn’t even started to talk about what’s on the new dashboard, and he immediately said, where’s Export to Excel, <laugh>? And I, I thought, wait, I just did this dashboard, so you don’t have to export to Excel, but everybody, to your point, everybody wants to, wants to pull it out. So I thought that was pretty funny though. And, and, and right on point with what you’re saying, I guess in the future, we won’t blame the hidden columns on the, for our mistakes. We’ll, blame AI, I think is where <laugh>, where we’re going. I hear me out. I think that, so the whole Python and Excel and everything, I understand why Microsoft invested $15 billion in, into open ai, and then they’ve continued to invest with their acquihires and other things they’ve done.
I know what, what they’re striving for. And we’ve already had this with copilot and with SharePoint being able to access documents and being, I mean, but, and I don’t, I don’t know when this episode will air, but just a couple days ago chat, GPT announced all these connectors to Google Sheets to outlook to teams, to OneDrive and, and SharePoint and all that. So that you, if you’re doing a deep research project, can go research all your own documents. And I’m gonna be really curious to see how that integrates with Excel. If you could actually ask a question in chat, GPT, you’ve got your connected to your OneDrive, you have Excel files in there, and you say, look in the 2024 final budget folder for version 23.6 or whatever of the budget, and tell me what we budgeted for t and e for mar, you know, whatever it is.
Mm-hmm. I wonder if it’s gonna have that ability to dig down, because right now, outside of doing that, it’s, you’re looking for integrations and to basically APIs or MCP, whatever you’re doing into the actual application. I’m gonna be ve and I just haven’t had a chance to test it yet. I’m very curious to see how deep those queries are gonna go. ’cause if you’ve got a, a spreadsheet with 15 tabs on it, it’s a 20 meg spreadsheet or something, I don’t know how how good chat GPT is gonna get in there and, and navigate that. Mm-hmm. But I’m seeing the future here, and we, I always joke that I, I know what Microsoft is envisioning is kind of clippy version 2.0 <laugh> where, uh, you’ve got this AI assistant that’s helping you write your formulas and helping you, uh, do everything. But this time works. And I, and I do believe I’m bullish long term on ’em. I know copilot isn’t quite where, you know, people want it yet, yet. So I guess I’m gonna break this into two questions. I was going on rambling and I was gonna ask, but first off, your thoughts right now of copilot, not as far as the, the chat part or interacting with files, but your thoughts right now with what you can do with copilot directly in Excel.
Chandoo:
Mm-hmm. So it’s a good, uh, good thing you mentioned that because I’m also using copilot in Excel a little bit more so that I could, uh, I’m currently developing a copilot in Excel, kind of like a training program. So I’m doing the research myself just to understand what the limitations are, what the possibilities are, and what the best practice could look like in its current shape and form. And while it is still changing a lot, I think it has come a long way and it does offer some good possibilities, especially, uh, either if you’re a busy person and you haven’t got time to figure out the formula or whatever, or you are learning and you have no idea what you’re doing. So these two are really high value use cases for copilot in space. But if you already have a ton of knowledge or you know which way you are going, uh, chances are you will get there faster.
That copilot can simply because of the current setup where you have to go to this panel, type in a pick prompt, wait for it to respond. Let’s say you want to highlight all the at risk projects in a big tracker, you would be able to do that if you know your way around, select the data, either filter it or go to conditional formatting, add a new rule, all done in under a minute. If you know your way around Excel, but you have no idea where this thing is or what it is called or how to use it, you have only briefly seen someone else do it somewhere, then you’re gonna struggle. You might actually watch a YouTube video from their bump into a shop and randomly get surveyed an ad that is not relevant and now go in a different rabbit hole. So you’re looking at 30 minutes, an hour or even a whole afternoon gone there.
And for you, uh, this thing is, is a godsend because you just ask the pointed question and it’ll do that in under five minutes. So there is a class of users who will benefit tremendously if they rely on copilot because they’re struggling and they’re still coming to terms with the new software because they’ve come from elsewhere or whatever. So in its current shape, I think that is a very valuable use case for copilot. It might actually get to a space where things can get a little bit more interesting. Like for example, right now we have got formula autocomplete. Uh, there might be a future version of autocomplete where ai, as you start writing equal to instead of formula, you will describe what you want and it’ll replace that with formula and no, no, those kind of things. So those kind of things is where it can get a little bit, uh, more in your face, but also more helpful.
Nevertheless, no matter which way these things go, you would always sense whether this and correct it as it goes. Because in its current definition, all AI technologies, they’re not deterministic. They won’t produce the same output two times. I mean, with enough training, they will, uh, but still there is this odd possibility that they can come up with a completely new piece of code because that’s how they’re designed. So that part of it is still a very real possibility that you would need to see that. And then you would still need to be able to comprehend and sense check that, but that’s a different space altogether. But currently it is that. The other thing that I also want to say is you mentioned how chat GPT added these characters now, um, but I’m not really sure if you’ve, you’ve seen this, but there is also a copilot that is not in Excel.
It’s called copilot on the web. So if you go to copilot Microsoft Cloud, it’ll take you to the copilot page. Now that is hooked up to your 10 by default, so it logs you into your Microsoft and there the connectors are already built in. So you could potentially ask like, Hey, can you analyze the budget act and then point to a file in your OneDrive? We can say the 2023 budget file, and then tell me the insights or, or ask a specific questions or, you know, have conversations about files. You can even point to an entire folder and SharePoint and then, you know, it’ll be able to do that. So I’ve been using it like that a little bit just to see, uh, what it could come up with. Even ask that, look at this Excel file, make a presentation, all of that is already there for the co-pilot on the web. So that ecosystem of different co-pilots doing different things is of good value. But again, because these things are still being cooked and there is new things added, sometimes things don’t work <laugh>, uh, it is still work in progress.
Glenn Hopper:
Yeah, I encourage people to get out there and, and try it out because if you’re just burying your head in the sand and ignoring it, it’s, you’re gonna get caught flatfooted when they finally do sort of hit critical mass and these things are working. It’s fun to play around with this. And when you find a breakthrough or some kind of efficiency gain, or if something writes your nested ifs better than <laugh> than you could or whatever, or more quickly than you could it, you know, it’s, it’s great to find something like that. But for people working in fp and a right now, is there anything they should be doing with generative AI to sort of stay ahead and, and understand the functionality right now?
Chandoo:
I would definitely say you should be aware if you are already in this space. And the good thing to do is just be aware. Look at what is happening in different things. There are lots of players here. We don’t need to know about all of them, but at least be aware of what the possibilities are in each of them. And definitely, no matter what you do, don’t go every day morning to YouTube and watch all the AI videos or things like that, that is gonna just mess up your mind completely. You are not playing in that space. Uh, instead maybe catch up with the news once a month or once every couple of months. There’s lots of blips that are happening, but some of them could be a flash in the pan kind of thing. And we would only know after five to 10 years, which of these amazing discoveries they’re making would actually survive all the test of time.
But these are exciting times, so you don’t want to miss the excitement out, be aware and, uh, try to either adopt one or two use cases. Think of them like, you know, what is one win that I can take from here and implement into my workflow this quarter or this half year? And think in that horizon. I think that might be enough. Uh, especially if you’re sufficiently skilled already in Excel. Like I said, if you know where you’re going, the copilot is not gonna get you there faster, simply because how it works currently. But if you know what it is doing, you know, sometimes some of the labor work that you do might get faster or better, or you might even come across some other way of doing it just by keeping your eyes open. <laugh>.
Glenn Hopper:
Yeah, good advice. This happens to me every time I get down this technology rabbit hole, and we’re getting down deep in it. But earlier, I, I asked you a question about training the finance teams, and then I kind of jumped over. But I, I do wanna talk about your Excel school and you’ve got this distinctive teaching philosophy, and I’m wondering if you could break that down to, as what, what core mindsets or techniques do you emphasize when you’re, when you’re explaining this and going through it, talk a little bit about, about your teaching pedagogy.
Chandoo:
Thank you. So the way I developed this courses initially, like when the site was getting popular, a lot of people started asking me by email or by comment saying, Hey, you explain, well, do you have a course that we could buy? And, you know, learn excel like the way you are doing? Because, uh, one thing that I find even today to a large extent is most of the courses, they’re all too theoretical, too made up in a way, the examples don’t feel realistic. And even when you are learning, there’s a lesson on wheel lookup. There is a lesson on index match, there is a lesson on X lookup, there is a lesson on pivot tables without actually connecting them to the real world and how and when and why you should use them. What happens when you do this or why you should be doing it.
That part is not very well explained in most courses. I’m sure there are some trainers and people who do that. So this is where I’ve always kind of decided that I’m gonna teach what I do when I’m looking at Excel and when I’m working with data. So if I’m teaching a dashboard course, then it’ll be like how I build it, because I know how to do this, I’m gonna teach it or not, because a book chapter says, this is the seven steps that you should talk about when you are doing this. So that’s what I have implemented into Excel school. And yeah, I’ve really enjoyed doing this program all these years, and I continue to do that. People still tell me this is one of the best Excel courses they’ve attended, and they get a lot more out of it, even from lesson one. Like even when the lesson says Module zero, watch this.
If you never used Excel before, they watch it and they’ll wait a sec, you could do that. You know, this is, there have been using it for 16 years and I never knew this is there. So yeah, that’s the, that’s the thing. And I like to keep the examples realistic and explain not just how, but like the reasoning behind it and, and how I solve the problems and encourage people to go in their own way because Excel offers multiple ways of solving any problem. So there is no points that you get for being loyal to index match versus X lookup or anything like that. So <laugh>, uh, yeah, that’s at the core of all the teaching that I do
Glenn Hopper:
Is as long as Excel’s been around, it’s great when we get new functionality and new things to talk about, such as the Python integration. And I, I know you have a lot of other parts that you can cover in the courses, but I’m wondering as you move through this, trying to keep the content fresh and everything for you right now. I mean, we’re halfway, just about halfway through 20, 25 mm-hmm <affirmative>. What is your, your own kind of roadmap look like for 2025 and beyond? Are there projects or research areas that you’re kind of focused on now that expand on Excel? Or what, where does your focus go from here?
Chandoo:
That’s a good one. What I normally do is, uh, because these days, the, the business side of chendu.org runs like this. So we have got the YouTube channel, which is the primary content platform. That’s where all the new material that I create is put. And that is where people discover Chendu for the first time in their life. They fall in love thereafter. Some time they might decide, oh, let me attend one of his courses, or he’s presenting at this conference, let’s go and meet him there, or whatever. But they enter into my trajectory through the YouTube channel and majority of the time these days. So all the planning and all the road mapping happens around that first, like, I’m thinking, what do I talk about for the next six months to one year? And then place everything else around that. So that, that’s where that goes.
So this year what we are trying to do is kind of, uh, go a little bit more in depth in terms of topic as well as offer different examples. So to give you a contrast, for example, last year what I did is on my YouTube channel, I made a playlist of around 14 videos called Free Data Analyst Course. Well, one of the things that I find as a big roadblock for people who are getting into the industries, uh, getting quality education is hard. So they either find that they have to pay a lot of money to learn these skills, or, uh, when they pay $10 or $20 to access a course, it doesn’t deliver the value. It is just, uh, made with false promises or the content is insufficient, that they only learn how to filter and sort the data thinking this is what learning Excel is.
Only when they get into work, they realize that is not even a of the entire Excel alphabet. So this free data analyst course covered all the major components of data analysis, starting with SQL, then Excel, power, bi, Python, uh, data modeling, power Query, all the major ingredients explained to sufficient depth that you feel confident at the end of that. So that was the focus last year. So now that we have finished that this year, what my focus is more on going a little bit more in depth, uh, creating more examples into different industries and different scenarios and explain those things. And then once that is done, then I’ll again go back and I start thinking, obviously a little bit of AI peppering is happening in that space because AI is also big and it’s in everybody’s face now. So a little bit of that. But yeah, for now, there is enough to talk about in Excel and Power BI and other things that I’m not really going back and thinking, oh, should I do something different or anything like that. There is, uh, plenty to discuss and mention here.
Glenn Hopper:
Yeah, I always talk about good accounting being the foundation. We, without good accounting, you can’t have good finance. But also without these Excel skills, if your fp and a team doesn’t have these basic Excel skills, they’re really limited as to how well they can model, how well they can even do variance analysis and, and going through and the visualizations and beyond just the building, the models, doing the formulas, slicing and dicing the data, there’s the whole storytelling part of what we do. And there’s the whole deeper understanding of the data, asking why. If you had every skill in Excel, but you didn’t have this sort of foundational domain expertise around finance or accounting or whatever department you’re in, it’s like having a Ferrari and not being knowing how to drive, but they’re also, it’s just a component of our whole job. So as you train people around the Excel models, do you pick up or, or have thoughts, is what advice would you give to CFOs and their teams that wanna move from we can do anything in Excel to being more of a, a true analytics partner?
And certainly if you’re working in Power bi, you’re seeing the power of this beyond even Excel. But I know sometimes it, and it just depends on, on the culture, but you can get so focused on, look at this cool stuff we can do Excel. And I, I had a professor years ago who always called it, uh, mistaking the map for the terrain where you just get so focused on the, the model of reality that you forget about actual reality. I don’t, do you have any advice or guidance on, on sort of expanding and growing beyond what you’re doing in Excel and being able to be that true analytics partner anyway?
Chandoo:
Yeah, that’s a good one. So I have a newsletter that I send on my website. It’s been there since pretty much the day one of my website is set up for Excel stuff. And, uh, people sign up for this newsletter and I send them. So the very first email is, uh, you know, welcome to chen.org. Thanks for signing up. You know, good to have you on that. The second email is Four Ways to Be Awesome in Excel and your work. And the very first bullet point in that thing is do not focus on learning Excel alone. This is the bullet point. And I get a ton of email replying back just about that bullet point alone, because people join the newsletter thinking they’re gonna learn Excel, and I’m telling them, don’t bother learning Excel alone. Uh, this, because this is the false thing that we, uh, we are entering into.
We think if I know Excel, I have cracked the puzzle, I have now suddenly figured out things. And this is the same thing that I made a mistake. I thought early on in my job as a business analyst, I would get into work and I’d see all these senior business analysts and people who have joined before me all have Excel open and they were using, um, this is, mind you, this is back in 2006 and seven, using all sorts of formulas like Offset and indirect and whatnot. And I didn’t know any of these things. I was like, I look at their spreadsheet, I would be intimidated, I would be basically sweating, thinking, you know, what is going on here? You know, would I ever be able to make these things? So I would spend every day after work, like around five o’clock we finish, but you can hang around in the office, no one is gonna kick you out.
So I would stay until seven, eight, some days just randomly going into the menus of Excel. This is before 2007 Excel. So everything had menus and click on insert function and just type random functions and see what they’re doing many time because, you know, there’s no like strong YouTube or even blogging kind of not fully there. So a lot of things happen through self-discovery. Uh, and I was thinking all those days that if I learned these, I would be able to better do my job better. And only when I got all of them and when I started using them, then I realized, oh, wait a sec, this is not what it is. This is just like part one of a bigger puzzle. I mean, I know how to now use a hammer, but I still don’t know how to build a cupboard <laugh>. I have to figure out how to do that.
That’s what people are paying me for not to wield a hammer or a screwdriver. So, uh, as long as you are aware that this is a tool and you are not really getting paid to use the tool, you are there to use the tool so that you could do something and bring yourself back and focus on that, that will be well enough. So some of the things that I think everybody should invest is invest in storytelling. We are now living in a world where we have to communicate with others. We have to tell what is happening, we have to convince others, and then we have to get them to act on things or we, we have to provoke action. If you are a finance person, you’re probably provoking some sort of action on budgets or whatever. If you’re a marketer, then you’re doing something. So, uh, that storytelling skills are important.
Excel is a medium to communicate the story, but you need to invest in that. Uh, you have to also develop some sort of a sense of how to build user interface with anything. It could be like a document, presentations, spreadsheet, power BI report, whatever it is that basically all user interface, right? Somebody is using. So think about like how they are using what matters to them and how to bring that out and understand more about your business, what the drivers are, and what happens when this goes up or this goes down, why it should matter, how it should matter. So all of that, this is, I think, so much more valuable. If somebody’s really good in that space, they’re gonna be more valuable, even if their Excel skills are poor. And you can always learn Excel, but these things require a little bit more outward focus, thinking about others in the organization, their needs and why and how and what matters to them, what motivates them, and then bringing that insight into Excel or PowerPoint or Power bi, whatever it is that you’re using. So, yeah, uh, I think that’s, that should be the focus. Anyone can learn Excel.
Glenn Hopper:
Yeah. I look at it like you mentioned that hammer and a screwdriver, and it’s that whole, if you just have a hammer, everything’s a nail. But if you have, you use the example of, if all I can do is sort and filter in Excel, and I think, well, if you have a big data set and you’re trying to figure something out and all you can, all you know how to do is sort and filter, then you’re gonna just pound your way through, hammer your way through that, trying to figure it out with the data. But once you know how to create a pivot table or, or go beyond that, it’s having this skillset, understanding what you can do in Excel. It suddenly you go from having just the hammer or the hammer and the screwdriver to having the full professional toolkit. Mm-hmm. And you, you think a lot differently about data sets when you’re looking at it and you know, oh, I can do this to get value outta the data.
And I think that’s part of our domain expertise. As finance professionals, we know the right questions to ask. We’ve seen the models, we don’t care how they were built, we see trends. We have hunches that we can validate with data, and we, that domain expertise isn’t going away, but it’s almost, you have this mindset from learning Excel and you’re, it’s different than if you’re querying tables or whatever because it’s so visual. So it’s, it’s not like writing SQL queries, you’re just, it feels, it feels like a tangible thing dealing with the data. So I feel like you really know Excel. It helps you sort of figure out what to do with the data. You really know finance, so you know the right questions to ask. And people, I get asked all the time, people having these sort of existential crises where if I’m doing a demo and showing ’em cool stuff they can do with generative ai, their first question is, well, when is this gonna take my job?
Mm-hmm <affirmative>. And I think that there’s this irreplaceable human value, even if Clippy does come back, and you don’t have to be able to do all these crazy offsets and, and things that we pride ourselves on with data. Even if you can do that with natural language, I still think that understanding that we have of working with the data is going to to be important going forward. I mean, for you being so involved in, in knowing every sort of intricate part of Excel, do you see where the analyst role is gonna just continue having this irreplaceable human value in, in the coming years as even as AI gets better?
Chandoo:
I’m optimistic that it should, but at the same time, I think there is also other players here that might have a different motivation. Like let’s say your only goal as an organization or as a service provider is to cut down the cost no matter what. Then you are trying to think, maybe we should develop an AI tool that will just replace an entire job function altogether. But I believe like maybe there are a few jobs like that. Uh, definitely there are few jobs, uh, but a majority of jobs involve a large proportion of human component and variability in their work. They’re not like point A is input, and point B is output. That’s not how jobs are working. Uh, there is going to be that human element that politics, the nuance. It would be very hard to grasp. It would be almost impossible to set up a prompt that would take all of that and encompass that.
So that is there. Uh, but at the same time, the way we are working currently would definitely change. For example, uh, even if I’m forget about Excel, like part of my job is making videos, right? Uh, so I view myself as I’m using Excel, I’m using Power bi, but I’m also a creator or, or a video editor who’s building the videos. That is also my job. It’s just, I don’t talk about that job because that’s, that’s something that gets me here. But that job, the way I was making videos, the way I was designing things three years ago is different from how I’m doing today because right now I have got an ai, uh, so I’m using AI as a sounding board to test ideas, refine them, uh, come up with hooks, come up with, uh, initial scripts, prompts, and, um, you know, layout of that, all of that, even for the co-pilot in Excel course, funnily enough, I asked co-pilot to design me that course, <laugh> <laugh>.
So, uh, obviously, uh, you know, it’s the first step of many steps that happen, but, uh, I think we should all be aware that that is how the future of work could look like. You know, 20 years ago, there is no Google. I mean Google was getting started. So the way we look for information was a different way, right? We would share all this links with each other and then say, if you want this code to this webpage, and somebody will go there to get that. But now nobody remembers a URL. We just search for it and go. And in future we, it may be a different world. So change is going to happen. I think we should be aware that the way we do our work will be different and, uh, prepare for that. And also be mindful that there is a vast component of our work, which is human component.
And that would be the hard one to replace the technology. It might be easy to replace, but that would only make us faster and better if we are good with these other things. On the other hand, if your job is just show up at nine o’clock, open a PDF copy value into, into spreadsheet, do it until five o’clock and then you leave work, then now you have a problem. You should try to move away from that. I know it sounds harsh, but, uh, but there are people who are doing that as well. Like, I was talking to some friends yesterday and they were saying, yeah, but I go, I know people who are doing this day in, day out, and I think that would be the problem area, but I don’t really know what to say. I mean, as a human, I’m worried for that possibility. Um, but as a technology enthusiast, I’m optimistic that that could happen. <laugh>.
Glenn Hopper:
Yeah. I feel like we could go all day, but we’re bumping right against time. And we’ve got two questions. If you’ve heard the show before we ask every guest. So the first one, and, and I really want to get to the one after this, so we’re, we’re gonna get through this one first though, but <laugh>, uh, the first one is, what’s something that not many people know about you and you’ve been online for so long, there may not really be <laugh> anything here, but is there something that we, we couldn’t find out about you just by Googling you or looking on chendu.org?
Chandoo:
I mean, uh, there is so much of information about me online. It’s not to brag or anything, it’s just that if you have built your entire personality around the website and all of that, and that’s your work, right? So then there’s like the other day my kids were saying, I, we asked Chad g pt, what is chendu net worth? And this is what it told us. It told some 7 million or something. So they’re asking Dad, do you have 7 million link <laugh>? Where is the one <laugh>? So, uh, there is so much of it. And with the AI and now all the hallucinations and whatnot, there, there is even more of it, some of it, correct. So of it incorrect. Uh, that, uh, I don’t know. I mean, there is, there are a few things. Like for example, for the last few years I’ve been, um, kind of, uh, getting more into playing video games.
As a kid, I never played video games and I was always like I told you, I was fascinated by technology. So video games were like one of the key things with technology, right? So I used to always, uh, watch with like really desperation and sometimes I want to play these video games as a kid, but, uh, I, we grew up poor, so I, we could never really afford any of these things. So when I became an adult and after moving to New Zealand, uh, uh, I decided, oh, maybe I could play video games now. So I started playing video games. I do talk about these sometimes in my YouTube channels. It’s not completely unknown, but <laugh>, yeah, I play a little bit of, uh, Zelda Elden ring and a few other things. And they’re fun, but keep me distracted from other things and I really enjoy that <laugh>.
Glenn Hopper:
That’s great. That’s great. I know our audience is waiting with bated breath here. This is the question we ask everyone, and I’ve just been looking forward the whole show to asking you this one. What is your favorite Excel function and why?
Chandoo:
There’s no like one favorite per se. I mean, it’s very hard because I, I strongly believe Excel is just a tool. What we do with it really matters. So in terms of function functions, like the ones that you can write in a cell, I would say filter is right now my, one of the most fun functions I use, I use that pretty much everywhere, wherever I’m working with data. And I’ve had some amazing case studies of how Filter helped me work with the data. So Filter definitely takes the cake in terms of general features of Excel, I think conditional formatting is really an awesome feature. It is very easy to use and there’s plenty of different ways to use it to make trackers, card charts and reports and whatnot. Both of these are like my most fun things to work with <laugh>.
Glenn Hopper:
So I’m a huge fan of conditional formatting. I mentioned earlier I’m colorblind. I, I get, I sort of run outta options before the colors start looking the same <laugh>. Mm-hmm. But I do love it initially to, to, to separate some things and highlight, you know, big variances over 10% or whatever. It’s, it’s kind of an underrated sort of simple thing, but it
Chandoo:
Yeah.
Glenn Hopper:
Adds huge value to it.
Chandoo:
Yeah. Yeah. Totally.
Glenn Hopper:
So we know chendu.org, but if our, our listeners wanna connect with you and learn more about what you do and, and in your courses and everything and, and we’ll put your YouTube and everything in the show notes. But is that, uh, are, are you active on LinkedIn or any of the social media channels at all? Or
Chandoo:
Maybe LinkedIn a little bit. I don’t post that much, but whenever something fun or really interesting happens, I do share that there. I do have an Instagram page, so people, if you want to get a little bit of behind the scenes and uh, and also get some Excel tips or Power BI stuff in a vertical format, they can check out the Instagram page. It’s, uh, Chendu Excel SX on Instagram. Yeah. But everything else, my website and YouTube are two main places where I’m really active.
Glenn Hopper:
Great. Well, Chendu really appreciate you coming on the show. This has been a great episode and we had a lot of fun.
Chandoo:
Thanks, Glen. Likewise. I, I enjoy talking with you and yeah, look forward to hearing the show.
