The spreadsheet features every engineer should master, such as dynamic arrays, XLOOKUP, Power Query, and structured references that make models easier to audit.
Excel remains the dominant tool for engineering calculations, data wrangling, and reporting across most industries. Modern Excel is dramatically more capable than the version most engineers learned on.
Dynamic arrays (introduced in Excel 365) allow a single formula to spill results across a range automatically. Functions like FILTER, SORT, UNIQUE, and SEQUENCE eliminate entire categories of helper-column workarounds. XLOOKUP replaces VLOOKUP and HLOOKUP with a cleaner syntax, bidirectional search, and a proper not-found argument.
Power Query (Get & Transform) is the feature most engineers overlook. It provides a no-code ETL interface for connecting to databases, APIs, and files, cleaning and reshaping data, and refreshing results on demand. For recurring reports that previously required manual copy-paste, Power Query can reduce a thirty-minute task to a single click. Structured references in Excel Tables make formulas self-documenting and automatically expand as new rows are added.
