For many accountants, Excel is both a cornerstone of work and a frequent test of patience. For Leila Gharani, it has become rather more: a career, a creative pursuit, and a way to share the joy of problem-solving with millions.
For almost a decade, she has been teaching people how to use Excel more effectively, showing that its value lies not in complexity but in how it helps people work and think more clearly.
With nearly three million YouTube followers and a thriving paid education platform called XelPlus, Gharani is one of the world’s most recognised Excel educators. She has built a global community of learners who see Excel not as a grid of cells, but as a playground for ideas.
In this article, Gharani reflects on what draws her to Excel, why it continues to matter after four decades, and how harnessing its evolving capabilities can reshape the way accountants work with data.
From necessity to mastery
Gharani began her career as an economist in Canada, before moving to Austria to work in a consulting role. In a corporate environment that used Excel mainly for routine tasks, Gharani saw proficiency in the program as a way to stand out. That soon turned into excitement when she discovered how far Excel could go beyond basic formulas.
“My research showed me there was this whole side to Excel that nobody on the team even knew existed: automation through VBA,” she says. “I decided to learn it and master it as a way to differentiate myself. Plus, I found it really interesting and fun.”
The more she experimented, the more she realised Excel could be moulded into almost anything, from data collection apps to automated reporting systems. When she introduced her team to interactive forms and protected worksheets, she says, they were taken aback.
“They couldn’t believe I was using Excel. It looked like a customised app where they just clicked buttons. They loved it.”
That sense of discovery has driven her work ever since. For small businesses especially, she says, Excel remains a pragmatic hero.
“Many don’t have the budget or time for complicated tools. Excel works for them. Does it have limitations? Sure. Can it cause problems if you’re not careful? Absolutely. But if you understand the risks and it gets the job done, then go ahead and use it.”
The joy of problem-solving
Gharani says the satisfaction of her work comes from helping people move from frustration to clarity.
“I love the problem-solving aspect. With Excel, you usually have multiple solutions that could work. [There’s] not just one right answer, but different approaches that all solve the problem. Our task is to find the one that doesn’t break once requirements change,” she says.
That multiplicity of approaches – formulas, Power Query, VBA, dynamic arrays – invites creativity, she says. And when something breaks, as it inevitably does, the process of fixing it becomes its own kind of discovery.
“This circle of doing, learning, getting creative and repeating that process is what I really enjoy,” she says. “I also love when I show someone a solution to their problem and they’re amazed at how simple it can be. And they can’t believe they didn’t know that feature existed before. I love the “wait, Excel can do that?!” reaction.”
Many accountants, she says, could save hours by using features they rarely explore, from dynamic arrays to PivotTables.
Reliability meets reinvention
After four decades, Excel still commands fierce loyalty among accountants. To Gharani, its staying power comes down to reliability.
“Take AI tools,” she says. “They update their models every few months. What worked yesterday might work differently today. But in corporate finance, you build a report and you need it to show the same numbers five years from now. You can’t just say ‘the tool updated’. Right now, I can open an Excel file from 20 years ago and it shows exactly what I saw back then.”
Accountants in particular depend on that continuity. Reports, reconciliations, and templates built years ago still open and calculate exactly as they did at the time. The program’s commitment to backward compatibility has made it a rare constant in a volatile digital landscape.
At the same time, Microsoft has steadily expanded what Excel can do, adding data connectors, Power Query, dynamic arrays and now artificial intelligence features such as Copilot.
“I love the ‘wait, Excel can do that?!’ reaction.”
Leila Gharani
“It’s all becoming part of the toolkit,” she says.
But she cautions against blind reliance. Her own experiments with AI have reinforced the importance of foundational knowledge. She recalls trying to import data from a PDF and asking an AI tool to generate formulas to separate the values. After an hour of testing different options, none of them worked. In the end, the problem wasn’t Excel – it was the approach.
“I should have used Power Query from the beginning, and I wouldn’t have had that issue at all,” she says. “The whole task could have been automated in a few minutes. AI didn’t tell me that. That’s something I needed to know myself.”
The lesson, she says, is that AI can accelerate the wrong process just as easily as the right one, and real efficiency comes from knowing how to use the tools you already have.
Untapped power
Forty years after its launch, and despite its familiarity, Excel remains widely misunderstood. One of the most persistent misconceptions, says Gharani, concerns its capacity.
“People think Excel can only handle about a million rows of data – the number of rows in a single sheet. The truth is it can handle millions,” she says. “You just don’t load it into the grid. Instead, you connect to it from Excel. The feature for that is my favourite one. It sits right there in the Data tab in the Ribbon: Get and Transform Data. That takes you to Power Query.”
Power Query, she argues, is the feature accountants need most – and use least. It’s built for the kind of messy, repetitive data work that defines so many accounting roles. Yet, many accountants still don’t realise what it can do.
“Accountants usually deal with a lot of data,” she says. “You’ve got data exports from your ERP system, files scattered in different places, PDFs someone decided was a good format to send you – and you need to combine it all, clean it up, and have a report ready for the monthly close.”
Instead of turning to automation, too many rely on manual workarounds – the copy-paste cycles and complex formulas that can turn the end of each month and financial year into a grind. Gharani sees this as a missed opportunity.
“Many overlook Power Query. Or they dabble with it a bit, decide it’s too limited for what they need, and give up. In fact, Power Query is just as flexible as Excel itself.”
Building better habits in Excel
Gharani’s videos have helped many finance professionals to rethink their workflows. Her teaching philosophy is simple: learn the logic, not the button. The goal isn’t to memorise features, but to understand how data behaves – and how to shape it efficiently.
Gharani has created hours upon hours of videos and courses to support accountants with this. She particularly recommends the video below:
That video on data cleaning is classic Gharani. It takes a familiar problem – messy data formatted outside Excel – that almost every accountant has run into, and that many of those have sworn at. And it calmly shows several ways to replace the repetitive tasks of data-wrangling with faster, repeatable techniques. Those techniques let Excel users spend more time interpreting data or just moving on to the next task.
For a more structured learning path, Gharani’s XelPlus business also sells courses, and bundles such as her Excel Essentials courses, designed to give Excel users a solid foundation. The cost is not negligible; the Excel Essentials bundle costs US$379 (£284). But for business users who need to maximise their productivity, her real-world solutions to common business challenges may seem worth the money.
There’s a reason she has accumulated almost three million YouTube subscribers.
The spreadsheet that keeps on giving
Few tools have shaped modern accounting as profoundly as Excel. Its longevity stems in large part from what it represents: control, logic, and reliability in a fast-changing digital world.
As digital tools become more interconnected and AI handles an increasing share of routine analysis, Gharani sees Excel’s role as the anchor – the place where people can still understand and test what their data is really saying.
“Excel will remain important because it’s adapting to what we need while staying reliable,” she says. “That combination is why it’ll matter in the years ahead.”
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