Spreadsheet skills every office professional needs (with AI help)

You don't need to be a spreadsheet wizard. Five skills cover most of what office professionals do every week in Excel or Google Sheets, and AI can now help you write the formulas.

1. Turn ranges into tables

In Excel, select your data and press Ctrl + T. Tables add filters, banded rows and, most importantly, formulas and charts that grow automatically when you add new rows. In Google Sheets, use Format → Convert to table.

2. Look things up with XLOOKUP

XLOOKUP (in Microsoft 365 and Google Sheets) replaces the older VLOOKUP and is easier to read:

=XLOOKUP(A2, Products[Code], Products[Price], "Not found")

It means: find the code in A2 in the product list and return its price, or "Not found" if it isn't there.

3. Summarise with PivotTables

A PivotTable turns thousands of rows into a summary in seconds: sales by region, tickets by month, expenses by category. Insert one, drag a field to Rows, a number to Values, and you have a report. Add a slicer for one-click filtering.

4. Highlight what matters with conditional formatting

Colour overdue dates red, top performers green, or add data bars to show size at a glance. Keep it to one or two rules per sheet so the colours still mean something.

5. Prevent errors with data validation

Drop-down lists and allowed ranges stop typos before they happen, such as a "Status" column that only accepts Not started, In progress, Done. Clean input saves hours of clean-up later.

Let AI write and explain formulas

"My sheet has Date in column A, Region in B and Revenue in C. Write a formula that totals revenue for the North region in March 2026, and explain each part."

Always test the result on a few rows you can check by hand. When reports become repetitive, the next step is automating them with Python.