Essential Advanced Excel Skills You Should Have in 2026
Advanced Excel skills are more important than ever in 2026. Work has changed so has hiring has. Standing out now takes more than just saying, “I know Excel.”
These days, employers are looking for people who can do more than open a spreadsheet. They want people who can take messy numbers and turn them into clear answers. The kind of answers that help teams make better decisions and save time.
A while back, I watched someone in an office spend almost a whole day fixing a report by hand. Rows. Columns, Copy, paste, again and again. The same work could have taken ten minutes with the right advanced Excel skills.
That is why this matters. You might be asking yourself a fair question. What are these essential advanced Excel skills that employers are looking for in 2026?
Let’s walk through them.
1. Macros
A macro is a computer program that does an action or a set of actions as many times as necessary. It’s recorded and used to automate repetitive tasks. For instance, macros are often used by financial analysts to generate weekly, monthly, or quarterly sales reports.
Macros are written through Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) an object-oriented programming language for Microsoft Office applications. Macros and VBA tools are found in the Developer tab. With VBA, you can refer to Excel Objects and use the properties, methods, and events associated with them to automate almost every task.
You create a macro by recording your mouse clicks and keystrokes. After you’ve created a macro, Excel will execute those instructions on any data you give it. You can also edit it to make changes to the way it works.
For example, you can use a macro to quickly clean up and format data, automate properties and actions in PivotTables and create and modify user forms.
2. PivotTables
A PivotTable is an Excel feature used to create reports from large datasets. It’s a powerful tool because it allows users to look at the same data from different perspectives. You can use a PivotTable to calculate, summarize, analyze, and see comparisons, patterns, and trends in your data.
You can use PivotTables to sort, count, total, or average data stored in one large spreadsheet and display them in a new table.
A PivotTable is an interactive way to; Present and analyze large amounts of data in many user-friendly ways, summarize and sort data by categories and subcategories, create custom calculations and formulas to be applied to the dataset, filter, sort, and group the data to focus on the information you need and present concise, attractive, and illustrated reports.
3. INDEX/MATCH
The MATCH function helps you find the relative position of information in the spreadsheet.
For instance, if you have a cell that reads “25,” you can set the MATCH function to look for cells with the number 25, and the results will show you the cell housing the data you’re seeking.
The INDEX formula returns the value of a cell or array of cells row and column numbers. These functions, together, are useful for parsing numbers in different but similarly arranged data sets – quarterly revenues for different products over the same timeframe, for instance.
4. Filters
Filters are used to temporarily hide some of the data in a table so the user can focus on the data they want to see. You can find Sort & Filter in the Data tab in Excel to filter a range of data based on the criteria you specify.
For Example, you can also use AutoFilter or built-in comparison operators like “greater than” and “top 10” to filter by number values and cell color.
“Once you find what you’re looking for, you can reapply a filter to get up-to-date results or clear a filter to redisplay all of the data. Filtering becomes even more helpful when you need to filter more than one column combination”, Tracy advised.
Conclusion
Do you already have these advanced Excel skills? If not, that is okay. Everyone starts somewhere
Sign up for this advanced excel short course today and start building skills that make you more useful, more confident, and more valuable in 2026 and beyond