I’m using Abacus Docs to extract dates from invoices from both the US and UK. A date printed as 04/05/2026 could mean April 5 or May 4, so converting it straight to an Excel date can hide the ambiguity. I’m considering keeping the original date text in one column and a normalized date in another, with a review flag when the source doesn’t make the order clear.

For people who handle mixed-region documents, do you use a locale field or vendor-specific rule in your workbook, or do you review every ambiguous date by hand? I’d like the original value to remain visible after sorting and filtering.

I have an issue where my cells with text dont center. Ive tried the format cells option and clearing any format on the cells. The formatting was fine up until a pasted a special character from chatgbt into the excel file. I dont know how to revert this and i cant go back to the previous version history since i didnt save my work. Any ideas to fix this problem. Thanks! https://imgur.com/a/exF82I3

I found that calling MAP inside a recursive LAMBDA seems to have a nesting limit of about 20. After that, Excel returns #VALUE!, not #NUM! or a clear recursion-depth error.

Minimal test:

REC_A = LAMBDA(n,
  IF(n = 0, 0,
    MAP(1, LAMBDA(x, REC_A(n - 1)))
  )
);

REC_A(20) works. REC_A(21) returns #VALUE!.

MAP is not doing anything useful here. It just adds one extra function-call layer per recursion step. But the error is misleading: I would expect a recursion or call-stack error, not #VALUE!.

I can also see that this applies to all lambda helpers.

Is this expected behavior? Is there a documented limit on nested MAP calls inside recursive LAMBDAs?

Hi!

I work for a theatre that’s about to put on Wicked for the second time. We’re trying to predict the sales trajectory by comparing it to the sales from the last time we put it on (2021) and would all much rather use Excel than the suggested method of AI.

Basically, I have all of the 2021 data. I have the sales trends to see things like “[x] tickets sold four weeks ahead, three weeks ahead … the last week of the run,” then ticket purchases for the 2026 show up to the present day. We’re about a month out and are hoping to see, like… “okay, it sold [y] around this time in 2021, so we can expect it to sell this 2026 version of [y]” if that makes literally any sense…

I know there’s a way to do this in Excel (of course, it feels like there’s a way to do EVERYTHING in Excel!), but I can’t quite connect the dots on my own, but I would also like to avoid AI and… was given this task because everyone thinks I know Excel really well because I understand PivotTables 😪😂

I feel like this is super vague, so I apologize and would be glad to clarify anything!

Thank y’all!!!

I need to track dates for projects due and I want to see full date, DAY of week, and time. I have created a custom number format for this:

mm/dd/yy
ddd
hh:mm AM/PM

This displays the info I want, but I can't shrink the cell size down like one normally can. Excel is forcing unnecessary white space on the sides.

In the GIF below I change the width value by the smallest increment allowed from 19.00 to 18.86 and I get pounded ("###...###"). The third row has the same data, with format changed to a single-line version with all line breaks changed to spaces. It fits fine.

I change the size to 18.29 (which is 4 steps smaller than 18.86) and the 1-line version is still fine. At the the 5th step (18.14) it truly does overflow the space. This proves that excel is not "seeing" the one-line version of the three-line and calling for a display overflow (getting pounded). Honestly, the 1-line version I made is actually bigger because it has printable characters (spaces) that the 3-line version lacks (line breaks or carriage returns instead).

Why does Excel think that my data is too wide and hitting the walls of the cell here?!?!?

Stupid problem, I know. I AM INTO THE PETTY DETAILS. Solution may well be "forget it and move on, you're asking too much." Which is my approach for the past two years with this. Things are slow and I'm annoyed and want to know if there is a possible solution.

The worksheet is WIDE with lots of at-a-glance info for tracking projects. I have crammed every column and only this one gives me grief. I use this format in one other column and I want to do a 3rd, but my tradeoff was to just get rid of that 3rd. I could bring that back if I could make these cells stop acting like this.

Also note that Col E font size is already smaller to accomodate somewhat.

I'm intentionally using a monospace font everywhere in this so that text aligns very well for cleaner reading/interpretation of other infodata. Because the whole point is for this to be a quick-glance tool for me and my team.

Excel 365, Version 2610 (Build 20527.20088 Click-to-Run)
Windows Desktop
English
Intermediate? Maybe Slightly Advanced?

I use Excel Web occasionally because of my company's SharePoint, and every time I select a cell that already has content, or drag the selected cell to one with content, the content is automatically deleted. If I type in an empty cell and leave it selected for more than 2 seconds, it automatically deletes the written content.

Hi everybody, I'm trying to have a dropdown list where it will show the data corresponding to whatever vegetable I select and hide whatever I didn't.

I tried searching but I do not know what are the keywords I should be using because I always end up on a data validation tutorial instead 😅 which doesn't work(?). Every tutorial I seen requires the data to be a table but I can't do it since I have the yellow category and veggie category which is merged across a,b,c,d (and I have a lot of veggies...). But I could be a 100% wrong here.

I really appreciate any advice!

image: https://imgshare.cc/9akpqg4t

I have spent ages learning Power Query for multiple tasks, but this one has stumped me so please help:

I am trying to use Excel to import JSON files and then automatically show me certain keys/values from within them. Some of these values are just 1 entry, others have arrays and I'm interested in both. (In this specific case, they're 3D printing profiles and I want to find temperatures that were used for past projects.)

So for example:

{

"name": "Bambu PLA Matte u/BBL X2D 0.4 nozzle",

"eng_plate_temp": [

"55"

],

"filament_flow_ratio": [

"1.006",

"0.98",

"1.006",

"0.98",

"0.98",

"0.98"

],

"filament_max_volumetric_speed": [

"22",

"40",

"22",

"22",

"25",

"22"

],

... etc

I import the JSON into PQ and then Convert to Table and I'm stuck, nothing I've tried will expand the arrays beyond these lists:

(I took out some of the keys in the code example above).

Ultimately, I want to be able to import a JSON and have Excel automatically convert this and then only show me certain keys from within it, and I don't really care if the arrays come in one cell or are expanded to columns. I just can't get further!

Hi everyone 👋🏻

First time poster here so if I messed something up please let me know so I can edit! I'm on mobile sorry if the formatting is iffy. Also I'm German and use Excel in German - I googled the corresponding names in English and hope they are correct, once again please let me know if something is off. Thank you 🫶🏻

To my problem:

picture of the values I want to use

I'm managing a pre-order and want to add an automated counter to the top of my sheet to get an overview of how many of the pre-orders have been paid already.

I have a drop-down for the "Bezahlt?/paid?" column so I can easily select "Ja/yes" "Nein/no" "Bei Abholung/upon collection" and I want to incorporate that into the summary. So if "yes" is selected the amount in the column "Betrag/amount" is counted and if anything other is selected it won't be added to the total.

Is something like that possible in the combination I have set up rn? I already tried VLOOKUP and IF with AND and OR and both give me errors 🫠

Is this because of the drop-down, the fact that the € value is fluctuating (25€ is pre-ordered once and 50€ is pre-ordered twice from the same person) or both?

Any help is immensely appreciated since YouTube and ancient help forum posts didn't offer a tailored solution.

Thank you very much in advance 💜

Hello, I'm working on a spreadsheet with about 500 cells of participants. There's a date when they exited our program, and we have to call them once a month. I've recently been handed responsibility for this spreadsheet and I'm wondering if there's a way to highlight the cells when it's time to call them.

For example, if there's a cell that has 1/1/2026 in it, I'd want it to change to red on 2/1/2026, 3/1/2026, ect.

I've only briefly played around with date functions, and when trying to figure it out on my own (on a copy of course) I somehow ended up turning the entire spreadsheet red.

If this is even possible, advice would be appreciated.

Quest 2: The Axeperiment

https://everybody.codes/event/2026/quests/2

Past Coding Challenge spiel on etiquette:

https://www.reddit.com/r/excel/comments/1pbgisa/advent_of_code_2025_day_1/

I want to make tables showing all column values as they are on another sheet so long as a cell in the row in a specific column meets the criteria. For example: if line 45 in Table A has O+M in column D then Line 45 in Table A goes into the new table. Can a Pivot Table do this?