How Much Time are you LOSING in Excel?
We all know the feeling.
You open up a spreadsheet thinking it’ll take 10 minutes… and two hours later you’re still fixing columns, cleaning messy data, and copying from your five different sources.
Welcome to the time warp of Excel - and it’s costing UK professionals more than we realise.
Same tasks, week after week
Let’s say you receive a weekly report from your CRM, a CSV export from finance, and a monthly snapshot from HR. Every time, you:
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Copy and paste into your master workbook
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Delete blank rows and fix dates
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Filter duplicates, rename columns, adjust formats
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Pray your formulas haven’t broken
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Repeat next week
You’re not alone — research from Microsoft shows that data preparation takes up to 80% of a data analyst’s time. Even if you’re not a data analyst, the cycle of repetitive Excel admin is a common pain point across roles: finance, operations, project teams, reporting, and beyond.
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The real cost? Lost time and trust
This hidden workload has a few knock-on effects:
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Wasted time: Every manual step adds up across days, weeks, teams.
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Higher error rates: Manual data wrangling is where mistakes creep in.
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Team frustration: People spend time chasing consistency instead of analysing and improving.
Sound familiar? Here's the solution...
Automate once. Reuse forever.
Power Query is built into Excel and was designed for exactly this: automating your repeat data prep tasks. It’s not about being ‘advanced’ — it’s about working smarter.
With Power Query, you can:
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Set up a transformation once (e.g. remove blanks, fix date formats, filter rows)
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Reapply it automatically every time you open or refresh the file
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Pull from multiple sources and combine them in seconds
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Reduce the number of formulas or helper columns you need
And the best part? No VBA. No macros. Just a step-by-step interface that builds your logic clearly.
A quick example: Merging monthly sales sheets
Imagine you receive a new sales report each month. In Excel, you’d normally:
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Open each file
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Copy the data
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Paste it into a master file
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Check column headers
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Add a new month field
With Power Query:
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Point to the folder
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Let Excel import every file inside
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Apply a rule once to combine, clean and format
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Refresh each month and it auto-updates
What used to take 45 minutes now takes 2 clicks!
Food for thought…
If you're spending more than 30 minutes a week doing the same Excel tasks, learn Power Query - it's built in to your Excel package, and the course only takes one day. You might not need more time - you might just need a smarter way to spend it...
