As PCMag's resident data journalist, I practically live in Microsoft Excel. I've learned that it's capable of far more than I ...

For years, building dashboards in Excel meant juggling helper columns, dragging formulas across endless cells, and praying your pivot table wouldn’t collapse under its own weight. But that’s changed.

Slow lookup formulas can kill productivity when working with large datasets. To cope with that, I've tested Excel's optimal lookup functions and their combinations for building lightning-fast formulas ...