What Keeps Excel as the heart of business: Chandoo
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Welcome to FP&A Today. I'm your host, Glenn Hopper. Today's guest hardly needs an introduction to anyone who has ever built a model in Excel. Pranav Dhirala, better known around the world as Chandu, the chief Excel officer, is the founder of Chandu.org, an award-winning Excel and Power BI community with more than 100,000 members and a YouTube channel that tops over three quarters of a million subscribers. His mission, in his own words, is simple. To

to make you awesome in Excel and Power BI. A 16-time Microsoft MVP 2009 through 2024, and former consultant, Chandu 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. Chandu, great to have you on. Thank you so much, Glenn. It's been an honor. And yeah, good to talk to you. How are you?

I'm good. I don't care how many times I say it. I will never be able to, on my first effort, say remuneration. It's like a tongue twister to me. Remuneration. I saw that word in the bio and I thought, oh, here we go. Well, you also, I think it's great. You've achieved the one name moniker, whereas...

Like if I just were Glenn, Glenn sounds like maybe your brother-in-law or a cousin that's occasionally borrowing money. It's like, I don't know, Glenn by itself just doesn't work. But Chandu, I love it. And we'll talk a little bit about your chandu.org back in 2004 and all that. But I guess, I mean...

I feel like most FP&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 love this story. Yeah.

Thank you. So it all kind of began with my fascination for computers. That's one of the things that kind of prompted me to go for 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 from computer science is the web technologies, especially creating websites and all of that.

And this was about the year 2000. So soon after I got my first job, 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, you know, write about what you're doing. So for me, it was two proud things. One, obviously to write about things, but also...

to understand how websites work and set up my own website. And 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 chendu.org 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 Purnachandra Rao Duggirala. It 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 Chandu since my childhood.

So I went with that and I had the two O's in there. It was kind of like a play 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 will be like that. Anyhow, 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 partying.

what sort of wild things I'm up to and all of that. 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 an

And at one point, the blog 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 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 everything.

there was really no looking back. Like, you know, once I started writing about Excel, more people started reading that website and sending me emails and it kind of prompted

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. And here we are today. So that's kind of like the brief origin point. 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 I share what I'm learning, how I use these tools, either for work or for personal stuff or with the audience all over the world. And yeah, like my mission says, I want people to 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. 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.

And thinking about how the medium in which you're delivering this information, how it's changed, because back in 2004, you know, I imagine it was you're writing and describing something and you're dropping in screenshots and maybe you put the Excel file that somebody could download a sample of it. But since then, you have YouTube where you can actually screen share and you can show exactly what you're doing and, you know, all the technology around that.

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 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, how has the community in your interaction with, uh, with your followers, uh, as the medium has changed, how has it changed over the last 20 years?

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 some names appearing almost daily basis. People would comment every day because I was writing every day and the community was also building up. A lot of people would latch onto these conversations and

They help each other out. Sometimes I would, let's say I would write an article about 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 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 subscribed to YouTube channels and watched a ton of videos already in life. 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

And YouTube thinks, oh, you like this kind of content, this creator. So it will show you another video by that creator. And one thing leads to another. And after two or three videos, you might subscribe to their 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 will show that person's videos for the next few weeks. It won't show them continuously. It will show them for the next few days to test whether your interests are really genuine and you're 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 is. So 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. If the creators have a very strong relationship

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 a lot of the people that kind of get into my orbit

are there with me maybe three to six months during the process of their 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

So, yeah, that is kind of like the difference between the community. So you understand that there is no, I mean, there are some people who watch my videos since the very first video I put. I am not saying they 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. Yeah, that makes sense. Makes sense. So you've been doing this a while, 20 years. This decade, Excel turns 40.

40, I think. And we're going to talk a little bit more about the others too, but you mentioned Python, Power BI, SQL, 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&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, 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 makes it the heart of everything? This is a very relevant question. And also,

This is something that most people miss out when they look at Excel. So my opinion is Excel is one of the easiest softwares to use. It has maintained its ease, like how approachability is, 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. So Excel, because it has got that approachability, most of us feel comfort around it. It's like,

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 coder all my life. I've done software development. I have used different kind of powerful tools for all sorts of things. And even then, sometimes one example being Premiere 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 have been a very proficient editor with other software. And I thought, okay, let's just learn Premiere Pro because it lets me create different kinds of videos. 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 a 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 all want to use it as the first starting point for any big thing. 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 with the advent of newer things, it is only growing. Sometimes it can get into that confusing territory, but it is still amazing how they have been able to obfuscate a lot of complexity and give that welcome, come here and play with your numbers and data feel every time you open Excel.

And over the years, I mean, I can't imagine you've trained like thousands of finance teams and pros and 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 F&A department, even today, are there

kind of some standard skill gaps that jump out first. Because I think about in a finance program, you're using Excel and you kind of figure it out as you go. But unless you're talking to other students or unless you're following someone like you, you're just, you're kind of figuring that out on your own. But I'm wondering when you go into an FP&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 how do you close them when you come in?

The things like I'm going to reflect on my last training that I did for an FP&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 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 possess a lot of 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 finance team implements a brand new 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, 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 going to empower our people with Excel because of especially 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. Then you start to see the possibilities. In terms of the skills gaps itself,

the things that I'm noticing these days mainly are 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 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 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 their day gets. The second thing is there is also a lot of kind of like marketing hype around all these BI solutions and everything, 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 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 PowerPivot, use Power Query to automate the data collection and then send it to the data model and PowerPivot 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 amazes people. Of course, Excel is not secure. So there are some other things that we need to worry. So these are what I would consider as major skill gaps. There are other things in Excel, but like features like Python and all, I feel like they're there. They're good to have, but also...

they're not really the deal breaker for most. Simply because if you're at that point, you're already using Python, chances are you do have a Python setup on your computer. You don't need Excel to use Python. Yeah. A couple of follow-ons with that. First off, what I've realized as I talk to people who are moving out of Excel, or not moving out of Excel, they're adding to their Excel skills and trying to learn Power BI and use that.

Have you found, doesn't it seem like Power Query is like the perfect gateway drug to get people to move from Excel into Power BI? Once you understand Power Query, it kind of opens up the possibilities with Power BI. Yeah, it is definitely. The thing that I feel people need to also understand is assess the needs correctly. Do you, not you as an individual, but do you as an organization need this

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 provided that, which means lesser cost and lesser headache, less number of software to maintain and train and guide people through and all of that.

But yeah, definitely Power Query and to a greater extent even Power Pivot are like that entry points into Power BI. Once you see that, oh, this is flexible and now we can move everything online and just put it there and connect it to other endpoints, that opens new doors and new reporting possibilities.

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 starts to make a lot more sense. And it changes the way you think about data. You mentioned the grid structure in Excel, but it sort of expands. To me, that's the way I picture it. Well, Pivot in general, but I just picture it moving beyond that.

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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 writing Python already, you're going to be in your IDE or in your notebooks or wherever you're writing Python and putting it in there. And I wonder, and you would know this better than me or 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 going to have to write to Python. You're just going to 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

I mean, and I know Python and Excel is not like using VBA. It's different use cases for it. But I wonder, I don't know, are you seeing, are there a lot of applications and reasons as a, obviously as a power user and someone who's training on this, are you seeing a lot of really helpful applications or does it feel like this kind of interim step?

I don't think it was a deliberate strategy from Python then jump to Copilot because these happened at different points in time. When Python was kind of planned and announced, 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 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 going to get. That's not how it is. What I find with Python and Excel is it is kind of like a

neither here nor there 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 is not full-fledged Python simply because it only supports a handful of libraries and

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 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 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're 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'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 creates a solution

that I found frankly just to be kind of like an amusing thing to have in Excel, but not really useful from a practical point. I use Python, but if I'm using it 100 times, 99.5 times I'm thinking I'll go to VS 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. It creates additional issues to the outputs generated. They come in as objects and that

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.

So maybe it was kind of like one of the checklist items for them and they wanted to have it there as a POC first and then see where the beast will go from there. But yeah, 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.

Yeah, I always pictured it, let me bring my Excel sheet into my workbook or into my Python, not let me drop my Python into Excel. But I don't know, it's going to be, it may end up being prescient though, as they do integrate more and more

And I know, well, I want to talk about AI in a minute, but also, so Data Rails right now, I don't know if you've seen, they have this whole new campaign with F Panda. He's an Excel lover and basically rebelling against all these Excel is dead conversations.

commentary that we hear every few years, we hear it. And since we're just talking about Python and we're talking about Power BI and we're going to 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 maybe suggests to you that Excel's on the way out? I think they need to open their eyes. They need to see that that's not how the world is. Definitely Excel, you

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. And it's only going to grow. It's just that there is now

more options and their kind of own products from Microsoft are trying to cannibalize into Excel a little bit. This seems like 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 kind of like the color branding that Microsoft went with.

Then out of blue, I think around sometime in 2023 or 2022, I don't remember now, Microsoft went and replaced the colors in Power BI with green color.

I did not. I'm colorblind. So you're dropping a truth bomb on me that I was unaware of. So right now it is kind of now back to neither green nor yellow kind of a color scheme when I opened Power BI. But they went and they did that. And part of me as a business person, I enjoy branding and that's one of the things that I...

and that i was kind of like deep got deeply passionate about back in my mba days and i still continue to like branding and design and all of that so part of me couldn't help but think this must have been like a deliberate strategy from somebody internally to see that a majority of would-be power user 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 better. I don't know. I'm just 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 green color. So...

Yeah, I think that alone is another contributor to this factor that people now think of Power BI can do all of these things, then why should we use Excel? And many times it's easy to portray Excel as a villain, like, you know, you make a big budgeting boo-boo and you somehow suddenly lost a billion dollars.

What are you going to 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 should check for hidden columns and you should trust that somebody better to do this job. So we get all of these things and that kind of amplifies the message and

But I think 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, SAS and whatnot. And always asking the question, where is the 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. 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 later.

which will be more cumbersome, more tricky to work with, and more restrictive. It's funny you mentioned that export to Excel. I'm working with a client right now and we redid their dashboard. When I showed them the dashboard, 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?" And 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 call it out. So I thought that was pretty funny though and right on point with what you were saying. I guess in the future, we won't blame the hidden columns for our mistakes. We'll blame AI, I think is where we're going. 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 acqui hires and other things they've done. I know what they're striving for. And we've already had this in, uh, with

with Copilot and with SharePoint being able to access documents and being, I mean, but, and I don't know when this episode will air, but just a couple of days ago, ChatGPT announced all these connectors to Google Sheets, to Outlook, to Teams, to OneDrive 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 going to be really curious to see how that integrates with

Excel, if you could actually ask a question in ChatGPT, you've got, you're 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&E for, you know, whatever it is. I wonder if it's going to have that ability to dig down because

Right now, outside of doing that, you're looking for integrations and basically APIs or MCP, whatever you're doing into the actual application. I'm going to be, and I just haven't had a chance to test it yet. I'm very curious to see how deep those queries are going to go. Because if you've got a spreadsheet with 15 tabs on it, it's a 20 meg spreadsheet or something. I don't know how good ChatGPT is going to get in there and navigate that. But I'm seeing the future here. And I always joke that

I know what Microsoft is envisioning is kind of clippy version 2.0 where you've got this AI assistant that's helping you write your formulas and helping you do everything, but this time works. And I do believe I'm bullish long term on them. I know Copilot isn't quite where people want it yet. So I guess I'm going to break this into two questions. I was going on rambling and I was going to ask. But first off, your thoughts right now of

co-pilot, not as far as the chat part or interacting with files, but your thoughts right now with what you can do with co-pilot directly in Excel. So it's a good thing you mentioned that because I'm also...

Using Copilot in Excel a little bit more so that I could... 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 either if you're a busy person and you haven't got time to figure out the formula or whatever, or you're learning and you have no idea what you're doing.

So these two are like really high value use cases for Copilot in its space. But if you already have a ton of knowledge or you know which way you're going, chances are you will get there faster than 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

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 going to struggle. You might actually watch a YouTube video from there, bump into a short and randomly get served 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, this thing 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.

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 will replace that with formula. I know those kinds of things. So those kinds of things is where it can get a little bit muddled.

bit more in your face, but also more helpful. Nevertheless, no matter which way these things go, you would always want to have a sense of whether this is right or wrong 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 but still there is this odd possibility that they can come up with a completely new piece of code because that's how they are 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 and

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 ChatGPT added these characters now, but I'm not really sure if 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 will take you to the copilot page. Now that is hooked up to your tenant 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? You can say the 2023 budget file and then tell me the insights or ask a specific question or have conversations about files. You can even point to an entire folder in SharePoint and then it will be able to do that. So I've been using it like that a little bit just to see

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's new things added, sometimes things don't work. It is a still work in progress. Yeah. And I encourage people to get out there and try it out because again,

it's, if you're just burying your head in the sand and ignoring it, it's, you're going to get caught flat footed 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, than you could or whatever, or more quickly than you could, you know, it's, it's great to find something like that. But for people working in FP&A right now, is there anything they should be doing with generative AI to sort of

stay ahead and understand the functionality right now? I would definitely say you should be aware if you are already in this space and then

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 going to just mess up your mind completely.

you are not playing in that space. 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 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, especially if you're sufficiently skilled already in Excel. Like I said, if you know where you're going, the copilot is not going to 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.

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 asked you a question about training the finance teams, and then I kind of jumped over, but I do want to talk about it, your Excel school, and you've got this distinctive teaching philosophy. And I'm wondering if you could break that down to us, what core mindsets or techniques do you emphasize when you're explaining this and going through it? Talk a little bit about your teaching pedagogy.

Thank you. So the way I developed this course is 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 learn Excel like the way you are doing? Because one thing that I find even today to a large extent is most of the courses, they're all

kind of like 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 VLOOKUP, there is a lesson on index match, there is a lesson on XLOOKUP, 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 that. 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 going to 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 will be like how I build it because I know how to do this. I'm going to teach it or not because a book chapter says this is the seven steps that you should talk about when you're 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've never used Excel before, they watch it and then wait a sec, you could do that? You know, this is there, I have been using it for 16 years and I never knew this is there. And I like to keep the examples realistic and

explain not just how but 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 uh yeah that's the kind of like at the core of all the teaching that i do i think

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 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 2025. 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 where does your focus go from here?

So that's a good one. What I normally do is because these days, 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 Chandu for the first time in their life. They fall in love. Then after 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 a majority of the time these days. So all the planning and all the

the roadmapping 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 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. But one of the things that I find as a big roadblock for people who are getting into the industry is getting quality education is hard. So they either find that

they have to pay a lot of money to learn these skills or when they pay $10 or $20 to access a course, it doesn't deliver the value. It is just 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 and

Starting with SQL, then Excel, Power BI, Python, 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, creating more examples into different industries and different scenarios and explain those things.

And then once that is done, then I 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 plenty to discuss and mention here. Yeah. I always talk about good accounting being the foundation. Without

good accounting, you can't have good finance. But also without these Excel skills, if your FP&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 going through 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, having that focus to drive, to know if you had every skill in Excel, but you didn't have the sort of foundational domain expertise around finance or accounting or whatever department you're in, it's like having a Ferrari and not 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 have thoughts? What advice would you give to CFOs and their teams that want to move from we can do anything in Excel to being...

more of 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, and it just depends on the culture, but you can get so focused on, look at this cool stuff we can do Excel. And I had a professor years ago who always called it mistaking the map for the terrain, where you just get so focused on the model of reality that you forget about actual reality. 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 partner, that analytics partner

partner anyway so i have a news 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 people sign up for this newsletter and i send them so the very first email is uh you know welcome to chendu.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 going to learn Excel and I'm telling them don't bother learning Excel alone. This is because this is the false thing that we are entering into. We think if I know Excel, I have cracked the puzzle. I have now suddenly figured out

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, this is mind you, this is back in 2000, 2006 and seven, using all sorts of photographs 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 going to kick you out. So I would stay until seven, eight some days, just randomly going into the menus of Excel. This was before 2007 Excel. So everything had menus, right?

and click on insert function and just type random functions and see what they're doing. Many times, because this is when, 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. And I was thinking all those days that if I learned these, I would be able to 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 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 as long as you are aware that this is a tool and you're not really getting paid to use the tool, you're there to use the tool so that you could do something and bring yourself back and focus on that, that will be 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 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 that storytelling skills are important. Excel is a medium to communicate the story, but you need to invest in that story.

you have to also develop some sort of a sense of how to build user interface with anything. It could be like a document, presentation, spreadsheet, Power BI report, whatever it is. They're 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 is really good in that space, they're going to 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 or whatever it is that you're using so yeah i think that's that should be the focus excel anyone can learn excel

Yeah, I look at it like you mentioned the 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 know how to do is sort and filter, then you're going to just hammer your way through that trying to figure it out with the data. But once you know how to create a pivot table or go beyond that, it's having this skill set

understanding what you can do in Excel, suddenly you go from having just the hammer or the hammer and the screwdriver to having the full professional toolkit. You think a lot differently about datasets when you're looking at it and you know, oh, I can do this to get value out of the data. 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 know

we have hunches that we can validate with data and 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 not like writing SQL queries. You're just, 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 I get asked all the time, people having these sort of existential crises where if I'm doing a demo and showing them cool stuff they can do with generative AI, their first question is, well, when is this going to take my job? And I think that there's this irreplaceable human value that hopefully,

even as the tools get, even if Clippy does come back and you don't have to be able to do all these crazy offsets 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 be important going forward. I mean, for you being so involved in knowing every sort of intricate part of Excel, do you see where the analyst role is going to just continue having this irreplaceable human value in the coming years, even as AI gets better? 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. Definitely there are few jobs, but 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. There is going to be that human element, that politics, the nuance in that work that 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. But at the same time, the way we are working currently would definitely change. For example, even if I forget about Excel, like part of my job is making videos, right? So I view myself as I'm using Excel, I'm using Power BI, but I'm also a creator 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 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 am doing today because right now I have got an AI. So I'm using AI as a sounding board to test ideas, refine them, come up with hooks, come up with initial scripts, prompts, and layout of that, all of that. Even for the co-pilot in Excel course,

Funnily enough, I asked Copilot to design me that course. Obviously, you know, it's the first step of many steps that happen, but 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. Like we would share all these links with each other and then say, if you want this, go to this web page and somebody will go there to get that. But now nobody remembers a URL. We just search for it and go. And in future, 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 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 bit 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 spreadsheet do it until five o'clock and then you leave work now you have a problem so

You should try to move away from that. I know it sounds harsh, 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 know people who are doing this day in, day out. And I think that would be the problem area. I don't really know what to say. I mean, as a human, I'm worried for that possibility.

But as a technology enthusiast, I'm optimistic that that could happen. 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 is, what's something that not many people know about you? And you've been online for so long, there may not really be anything here. But is there something that we couldn't find out about you just by, you know, by Googling you or looking on chendu.org? Oh, God, no.

I mean, there is so much of information about me online. It's not to brag or anything. It's just that if you've built your entire personality around a website and all of that, and that's your work, right? So then there's like the other day, my kids were saying, we asked Chad GPT, what is Chandu's 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? Where is the money? Show it to me. So there is so much of it. And with the AI and now all the hallucinations and whatnot, there is even more of it. Some of it correct, some of it incorrect.

uh that i don't know i mean there is there are a few things like for example for the last few years i've been 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 um

like really desperation and sometimes I want to play these video games as a kid but we grew up poor so we could never really afford any of these things. So when I became an adult and after moving to New Zealand I decided maybe I could play video games now so I started playing video games. I do talk about these sometimes in my YouTube channel so it's not completely unknown but yeah I play a little bit of

Zelda, Elden Ring and a few other things. They're fun but keep me distracted from other things and I really enjoy that. That's great.

I know our audience is waiting with bated breath here. This is the question we ask everyone and I've been looking forward the whole show to asking you this one. What is your favorite Excel function and why? There's no like one favorite per se. I mean, it's very hard because I strongly believe Excel is just a tool. What we do with it really matters.

In terms of function functions, like the ones that you can write in a cell, I would say filter is right now 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 great.

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 so yeah both of these

are like my most fun things to work with. So I'm a huge fan of conditional formatting and but I run I mentioned earlier I'm colorblind I guess sort of run out of options before the colors start looking the same but I do love it initially 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 adds huge value to it. Yeah totally.

So we know Chandu.org, but if our listeners want to connect with you and learn more about what you do and your courses and everything, what are, and we'll put your YouTube and everything in the show notes, but is that, are you active on LinkedIn or any of the social media channels at all or?

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 also get some Excel tips or Power BI stuff in a vertical format, they can check out the Instagram page. It's chendu.xlsx on Instagram. And yeah.

Yeah, but everything else, my website and YouTube are the two main places where I'm really active. Great. Well, Chandu, really appreciate you coming on the show. This has been a great episode and we had a lot of fun. Thanks, Glenn.