Excel is essential to your finance work, but getting from a financial question to the right formula, analysis, or visualization can take time. AI can help you.
This free practical guide shows finance managers how to use AI as an Excel assistant, helping you work through everyday Excel tasks while keeping the underlying financial logic and human review firmly in place.
Use this resource to learn how to:
- Turn plain-language questions into Excel formulas
- Understand and troubleshoot formulas you didn’t create
- Choose useful Excel functions for different finance tasks
- Clean and prepare financial data for analysis
- Use AI to support variance and scenario analysis
- Get help setting up PivotTables and choosing charts
- Check AI-generated formulas and calculations before relying on them
- Write stronger prompts using the included quick prompt reference
You’ll find practical examples and prompts throughout that you can adapt to your own workbook.
AI can make Excel more accessible, but it doesn’t replace financial judgment. Use this resource to work through Excel problems more efficiently, while checking formulas against your workbook and data and applying your own professional judgment to the results.
Pair it with our training
This resource works well alongside our AI for NGO Finance Managers course, which explores ways finance professionals can use AI across budgeting, monitoring, internal controls, and other areas of their work — without losing the human judgment those decisions require.