Unlock Excel – Two Down, One to Go

I’m in Australia for the third year in a row, the second year as part of the Unlock Excel conference. Sponsored by CPA Australia, Unlock Excel brings together six Excel MVPs to present new technologies, and review existing technologies, in front of leading accounting and finance professionals.

At this point, we have finished two-day conferences in Melbourne and Sydney, and we’re gearing up for the finale in Brisbane.

The Excel MVPs on this trip include Liam Bastick, Tim Heng, and Mynda Treacy from Australia, Gašper Kamenšek from Slovenia, Ken Puls from Canada, and myself, Jon Peltier from the United States. Liam and Tim are financial modelers at the consulting firm SumProduct LLC, which also provides live and video training. Mynda and her husband Phil run My Online Training Hub, which hosts a blog and many online courses covering Excel dashboards, Power Query, Power Pivot, and Power BI.  Gašper runs the Excel Unplugged blog and offers advanced training in Excel, Power Query, Power Pivot, and Power BI through his new Excel Olympics website. Ken is an experienced author, trainer, and blogger on Excel and Power Pivot technologies and runs the Excel Guru site. I specialize in charting and VBA programming, through training, custom programming, and my Excel charting add-ins, and you can read my blog here at Peltier Tech.

The MVPs are covering Excel topics like Pivot Tables and Pivot Charts, Formatting and Styles, Tips and Tricks for Charts and for Excel, Range Names, Data Validation, Automating Charts and Reports without VBA, and Customizing Excel. They are discussing financial modeling, budgeting and variance analysis, modeling of working capital, and KPI reports. Business Intelligence topics include deep dives into Power Query, Power Pivot, Power BI, and Dashboards.

Microsoft has sent Annie Colonna, a Program Manager on the Excel team, to highlight some new features of Excel and to share insights into how Excel will continue to develop. Annie and the MVPs have had several rousing discussions with conference attendees in daily Q&A sessions.