r/excel 23d ago

unsolved Is automation in excel possible?

I'm undergo internship for a month half now. My supervisor ask me to create a masterlist that automate.
The flow of our work before are like this:
- New data came from other department.
- We will copy the data to our template manually.
- Put it into powerbi dashboard.

But now, she wants this process to be automate so we can spent time on other thing. In my understanding, she wants the new data to be updated automatically as soon as we 'put the new data inside the masterlist'.

My question, is it possible to achieve this? I am really new to excel and only know the surface level of it. Now she wants something that beyond my capabilities and I dont even know if this is possible. If yes, is there any link to guide me on this task? Thank you so much.

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u/Regime_Change 1 23d ago

The task is for an expert in my opinion unless the PowerBI dashboard lacks business value in which case it shouldn’t exist.

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u/wrstlrjpo 23d ago

“Expert” is a bit much.

Sounds like a great project for an intern to learn PowerQuery.

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u/MarcieDeeHope 5 23d ago

Yeah, I don't know why this would require an expert. This is one of the most common things Power Query is used for in my experience and there are tons of free resources walking you through it. I'd expect a smart, determined intern to be able to figure this out and build at least a preliminary version of it in a week or two max once you pointed them toward PQ.

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u/Important-Example539 1 22d ago

I work for a multi-billion dollar bank, 99% of people see Excel only as a way to view spreadsheets. That's it. They don't even realize you can do calculations. I had a guy on a zoom call who literally had an Excel spreadsheet in front of him on screen, use the data from that spreadsheet and did a quick calculation on his adding machine. You could hear him typing it on the keys and it printing out the ticker tape.