Mastering Excel for Law Firms: Tips Lawyers Actually Need, with Barron Henley

Chad Fox: 

Hi, I am Chad. 

Stephanie Everett: 

And I’m Stephanie. And this is episode 589 of the Lawyerist Podcast, part of the Legal Talk Network. Today I’m talking with Barron Henley about why lawyers should use Excel more and some tips for how to get started. 

Chad Fox: 

Today’s episode is brought to you by 8:00 AM and you’ll hear Zack’s conversation with them coming up in just a bit. 

Stephanie Everett: 

So Chad, it’s November and around here. We think that means getting your books cleaned up, ready to go, 

Chad Fox: 

Getting ready for the new year, new goals, new strategies, new start. 

Stephanie Everett: 

Yeah, I always love the first of the year for that reason, and it’s going to be here before we know it. So we’ve been, I think telling all of our lobsters and working with everybody about now is the time to make sure you have your arms around the current state of things and your current numbers. And sadly, we’ve worked with enough lawyers to know that maybe those books aren’t up to date, maybe they haven’t looked at that part of their business in a while. Maybe they’re a little nervous to, and we’re here to give you a little love and encouragement and say, this is your sign. Go get your books cleaned up. 

Chad Fox: 

I mean, at very minimum we should be looking at our books every month, but at the very, very minimum, at least going into the new year, I mean, if you don’t look at ’em monthly, quarterly, I mean certainly you want to look back on the previous year and be able to see, okay, here’s what happened. Here’s my plan for the new year. 

Stephanie Everett: 

And I think I suspect that a lot of folks just get behind. They haven’t reconciled, haven’t updated it, and so then they’re like, oh, it’s kind of the thing that gets pushed off because it’s not the needy thing of all the things in your business. 

Chad Fox: 

It’s not the squeaky wheel, 

Stephanie Everett: 

But now comes the time where it’s squeaking. And I like to remind people too, this is a good place to outsource. So if you do need help, there’s people who will just come in and help you get caught up and get cleaned up. I mean, bookkeeping is an easy thing to outsource anyway, but even if you just need some help getting your arms around it and kind of getting it back under control, don’t be afraid to ask for help. 

Chad Fox: 

It’s a good point. It’s been an emphasis for me with a few of my lobsters is if you’re not looking at it yourself, bring in a bookkeeper and let’s get eyes on it. And I have a couple of lobsters that I’ve been pushing just to get updated financials so we can look at it. They haven’t looked at it in a couple of months. I’m like, Hey, what’s going on every call? What’s going on with your bookkeeper? And they’re going to hear this, and they’re going to know I’m talking about them. So this is your nudge. 

Stephanie Everett: 

There you go. If you’re thinking, Hey, numbers are intimidating, or I don’t know, I don’t know, I feel a little lost in that area. Here’s a chance too. We have some great podcast episodes on this. Bernadette, one of our strategists, she talks about this a lot. So maybe check out Lawyerist podcast, episode 306 or number 583. Bernadette goes over, get to know and love your numbers again. In episode 306, she actually walks you through how to read those financial statements. And then in episode 583, she talks about scaling your law firm, finances, how to think about it as you move up and as you kind of grow and mature as a business. I mean, she’s just a bunch of episodes with us, one on KPIs, if nothing else. I’m always like, I just Google Lawyers podcast, Bernadette, and there’s a ton of great episodes, but I would get started with those. The point is, there’s no excuses, guys. Let’s get our arms around our numbers so we know what’s happening in our business. 

Chad Fox: 

I mean, the accounting piece is the language of business. Even if you’re not fluent, you have to, at least if I dropped you in a foreign country and you didn’t know the language, you’d have to pick up some of it to be able to get by. And I kind of see this similar to that. 

Stephanie Everett: 

I like that. That’s a good analogy. Alright, well with that strong encouragement from the folks who love you and we say it with all the love in our heart, but go do it people. Let’s check out Zack’s conversation with 8:00 AM and then we’ll hear my conversation with Barron on using Excel. 

Zack Glaser: 

Hey y’all, it’s Zack, the legal tech advisor here at Lawyerist, and today I’ve got Helen Coyne with me, the senior manager of product marketing at 8:00 AM and we are talking, you guessed it, artificial intelligence, but we’re talking artificial intelligence because there’s so many layers and ways that we can approach artificial intelligence and 8:00 AM understands that and they are coming out with a lot of ways that their artificial intelligence platforms products are interacting with their users. So Helen’s here to talk to us about that a little bit. Helen, thanks for being with me. 

Helen Coyne : 

Yeah, thanks for having me, Zack. So let’s first talk about the naming. So at 8:00 AM our AI solution suite is called 8:00 AM iq. So the reason we’re going with 8:00 AM IQ is this is one of our first shared single service layers across all of our solutions. 

Zack Glaser: 

So it’s not just my case iq, it’s 8:00 AM iq. So it goes across all of the whole suite of products that y’all have. 

Helen Coyne : 

That’s correct. So it’s not going to be my case iq, it’ll be 8:00 AM IQ for my case, 8:00 AM IQ for case pair, 8:00 AM IQ for docket wise, so on and so forth. 

Zack Glaser: 

Okay. 

Helen Coyne : 

So a couple benefits to that, right? That centralizes all of the logic so that all of the AI functionality can be managed from one centralized place, 

And that presents also a single unified 8:00 AM brand identity for it helps standardize the AI functionality across all of the 8:00 AM brands and solutions. So you’re not going to have IQ working one way and docket wise in a different way in case pair in a different way. In my case, it also presents a consistent experience for the customer. So these services can be accessed by multiple clients. So web application, mobile devices, APIs, and it just makes the functionality because it’s consistent, it’s easily understood by the customer reducing any kind of confusion, and they know exactly what to expect regardless of the solution that they’re working in. 

Zack Glaser: 

Right? Well, and one of the reasons that’s important that you and I were talking about right before we got on here is because artificial intelligence and the way that we’re interacting with AI inside of our products, outside of our products is such a moving target right now that we kind of have to intentionally create that comfort level, that level of usability really 

Helen Coyne : 

To that point. We even had to do quite a bit of consideration and had quite a few discussions around how we were even going to go to market with our ai. 

So this 8:00 AM IQ case assistant, which is a feature that’s coming out this later on this month, it is delivered via a conversational chat bot. So there were some original ideas. Do we call this chat with cases? It’s an intuitive name that is something easily understood. Everybody understands where the chatbot is, but the more that we discuss that, the less we were convinced that that’s future proof. This is the way AI is being delivered in some instances today via chatbot. But is that how it’s going to look six months from now, 12 months from now, 18 months from now? We are not confident of that. As you said, things are changing really fast, things are evolving very quickly. So we wanted to come up with something that it was a little bit more future-proof. So we’ve made the decision to refer to 8:00 AM IQ as AI assistance throughout our solutions. 

Zack Glaser: 

Gotcha. And by future proof, one of the things I like about our conversation earlier, one of the things I like is that what we’re talking about is future proof for the user. The user being able to understand how we use this as opposed to future proof for branding purposes or something like that. It’s future proof for the user being able to say, okay, I know where the artificial intelligence fits into my platform that I’m using because y’all actually went out and did some user case studies and really talked to a lot of the users that y’all have. 

Helen Coyne : 

That’s exactly right. So before we’ve spent the majority of the past year running customer surveys, talking to customers again, everything’s happening fast and furiously. As soon as AI became we chat, CPT was released, all these AI startups started popping up everywhere. Everybody got excited about it. Nobody really knew how to use it. People were diving into it, maybe people were using it without proper reviews that might’ve gotten them into some hot water. So we wanted to be really thoughtful. We are a trusted technology partner and have been for 20 years two legal professionals. So we wanted to make sure that our AI was very thoughtful. Some of the things that we learned in these conversations with our customers was one were people were afraid of ai, they were afraid to trust it. They didn’t trust it implicitly. Again, some of it was some of the bad press that it had received with some legal professionals not doing their due diligence with doing the proper review. 

And then we also learned that they were a little more comfortable with using it for routine tasks, drafting work, timekeeping, billing, finding information. It turns out that legal professionals spend a significant amount of time in their workdays looking for information, looking for data, looking for documents. And so we decided based on those conversations with our customers that what we delivered, what we were going to deliver to them was going to deliver value in ways of helping them practice the business of law. We weren’t going to get into the practice of law, we weren’t going to get into the legal research. We were going to help them run their day-to-day business operations more efficiently and more productively by sort of weaving AI throughout all of our solutions. 

Zack Glaser: 

Well, okay, so let’s get into specifically the AI case assistant. I think I know what that’s going to do, but what are the types of things I can get AI case assistance to do for me on the platform? 

Helen Coyne : 

First thing, what it does is it allows you to ask questions of an individual case. So 8:00 AM IQ will search across text-based documents, notes, calendar, events, messages, tasks, case fields, looking for information as data sources to respond to your inquiry. It’s not here yet, but once we launch, we’ll be adding invoicing and billing information as well. So for example, firms can ask questions like summarize the key events and the employment case or list all the mentions of the defendant’s contract breaches or what evidence supports the plaintiff’s negligence claim. And IQ will go out and again, source all of the data from all of those documents, analyze it and extract the relevant information, compile it into an easy to read summary or outline. 

Zack Glaser: 

I mean, that makes sense as to what you named 

Helen Coyne : 

It, right? Yeah, exactly. 

Zack Glaser: 

That’s what I would expect from the case assistant. Awesome. So along the lines of making this intuitive, making this something that works for the attorneys, how are y’all making sure that there are no hallucinations or allowing attorneys to be confident in what’s coming back from this assistant? 

Helen Coyne : 

That’s a great question and it’s a really important question. So the guidelines that I’ve been reading offer 70, 30, 70% of the work can be done by ai, and then 30% should be done with human review. So humans should be just reviewing the output, making sure that it makes sense. So to that end, we’ve incorporated citations in our output. 

We’re right with case assistant. So when you get the summary, when you get the outline, when you get the statement of facts or whatever output that you’ve asked for, all of the data, any numbers, any stats, there’ll be a tag there and right to it will hyperlink directly to the data source where that data that came from. So that’s going to cut down on the amount of manual review. People can still, and of course we encourage everyone to review any output, but this makes it a lot easier for them just to click the tag. It’ll take them exactly right to the data source and that’ll allow them to validate the information. 

Zack Glaser: 

Okay. Okay. Well, as people can tell from the speed of how we’re talking, there’s a lot of information, new information coming out about 8:00 AM IQ and the artificial intelligence that’s there. Where can people find more information on this if they’re so inclined? The 

Helen Coyne : 

Best place to find more information about that is eight am.com/ai. 

Zack Glaser: 

Okay. Okay. Again, Helen, thank you for being with me and help me work through some of the new offerings that 8:00 AM which a lot of people might still remember that is was my case peer docket wise and that family of products, but thank you for helping me work through how the artificial intelligence is coming into that. 

Helen Coyne : 

Well, thank you for having me and I enjoyed our conversation. 

Zack Glaser: 

And again, you can find more information on this at eight am.com/ai and that’s the number 8:00 AM 

Barron Henley : 

Hi, I am Barron Henley . I am one of the owners of Affinity Consulting and I specialize in document automation and training, particularly on core production tools, which are defined as software applications used to produce work product. So that generally revolves around Microsoft Office, word Outlook, Excel, PowerPoint, and also PDF program de jour, Acrobat Power, P-D-F-P-D-F, editor, et cetera. Because generally speaking, those applications are wildly underutilized. It’s low hanging fruit to improve the use of tools people already own. They don’t have to buy anything new and they’re just getting better usage out of stuff they already spent money on. And to that end, a lot of times one of the shining examples of an underutilized application is Excel. 

So we have an Excel class that’s really, it’s not like a financial analyst super nerdy in the weeds Excel class, it’s just how can law firms use it because they all have it and they’re not really making use of it. And that hurts my heart when people have powerful software they’re not using. So the idea of the class is to just show people how you could use Excel, different ways you could use Excel. And I mean, I’ve got a little slide I could show you that kind of walks through some examples of ways you can use it. But even on a very basic level, I was mentioning before we got started here that I had about 240 word perfect files. I was converting to word for Affirm and that process, just so you know, if you let Word perfect convert to word or word convert your word perfect file, you’ll have a giant mess that is uneditable and will make you want to stab yourself. So 

Stephanie Everett: 

Don’t do that. 

Barron Henley : 

In order to properly convert a word, perfect file, you literally have to open the document in Word perfect, select it all, copy and paste it into a new blank word document with no formatting attached whatsoever. Just draw a text and then format it out once it’s in the Word document. And while that’s kind of a scorched earth approach to a file conversion, it does eliminate a whole bunch of issues that you would otherwise have to find and eliminate in the resulting document. So anyway, they sent me of all those documents they sent me, one of them was an expense report and they were using Word perfect previously and Word Perfect’s tables are a lot more powerful than Microsoft Words tables in a document. I mean it goes back a long old history of where Word Perfect came from, but word Perfect came from the dos world where you could only run one program at a time. 

So if I wanted to do a spreadsheet, I had to close Word perfect and open Lotus 1, 2, 3 or VisiCalc or whatever you were using, and then do my spreadsheet work and then come back to Word perfect. Well, they didn’t want you to have to leave Word perfect because you might not come back. I don’t know what they were thinking, but they basically built spreadsheet functionality into Word Perfect tables because back then Word Perfect did not have Quatro Pro and all the other ancillary things that are part of the suite today. It was just that program word perfect. So they never degraded the table functionality in Word perfect. And it’s powerful. It’s more powerful than Word. The reason that Microsoft doesn’t have similar functionality in Word tables is because they always had Excel. They always had Excel, so they didn’t need to compensate for some, and it came out in the Windows era when you could run two applications simultaneously. 

Stephanie Everett: 

Yeah, 

Barron Henley : 

So anyway, 

Stephanie Everett: 

Let’s just define a few things for people. Maybe everybody knows this word is like documents word. I mean it sounds silly to even just say that sentence, but Excel, I think you were getting to this, it allows you to do calculations and formulas and math 

Barron Henley : 

Among other 

Stephanie Everett: 

Things and advance. And 

Barron Henley : 

That’s why I’ll go through all the stuff because Excel does things I don’t think people expect it to be capable of. So that’s why it’s kind of useful to go, here’s a way you could use it. And people are like, what? I’ve been doing it the hard way using whatever else Microsoft Word. I could have been using this, but if I share my screen, I’ll just show you the result of screen share. So the functionality they wanted, if I put in 32 miles here, they wanted that next thing to calculate, which you can see it just did. And then if I spent $15 in tolls and $35 in parking and $150 on meals and then another $26 on transport, and I went out for a night on the town and that cost me $258 and then I had other miscellaneous expenses of $5 and 25 cents as you can see everything. 

I got subtotals down here and I got totals out here, and if I do another row, it’ll do the same thing. The point is I didn’t have to do anything for those functions to automatically update. And then if I scoot over to this part of it up here, they got, this is just a mileage reimbursement and they wanted you to put in what was your odometer start and end. And that would, so if I had 10,100 miles on my odometer and then I came back and it was 1,250 or 10,250, it calculates the 150 miles in between and then multiplies that times whatever rate you put up here. So if the IRS changes the rate to like 0.75, it automatically will update everything in it. And again, this has got totals at the bottom, which show up here. Now, I could have done all this in a Word document and in a word table, but in order to update all the fields, you’d have to select the whole thing and then tap F nine or right click and say update fields. And the reality is people will forget to do that and then the numbers will be wrong and there’ll be what’s wrong with this stupid form? It doesn’t work. I don’t have to tell ’em anything about this. You open it up, it’s intuitively obvious what you’re looking at, you type stuff in and it just calculates. 

So sometimes a document like that is just a better use is in Excel, and that’s exactly the case right here. And then other ways you could use it, any kind of accounting, if you got to show money coming in, money coming out. So this is an example of an accounting, right? And a lot of times law firms have to produce these kinds of things. I got to show money in money out totals, subtotals and that kind of thing. And a spreadsheet is obviously perfect for that. You might also have an amortization schedule where you’ve got a real estate transaction and you want to show people the distribution, an amortization schedule for that. As you’re not familiar with that weird word, it just means showing distribution between principal and interest on a loan. So if I had a $350,000 mortgage for 30 years at 5.75%, it tells me what the payment is. So if I change that to 3 75 and let’s say interest rates went down to 5.5, I immediately get exactly the payment. It tells me the payment, and then it also will calculate the distribution between the principle and interest as you can see below, and the running balance. I did real estate work when I was in private practice and I did a lot of residential closings, and so I always ran amortization schedules for people just because I thought it was quite useful. 

Closing statements, disbursement schedules. So you got, again, money coming in, money coming out, I got this amount of money in my trust account and I’ve got to end up with $0 in my trust account. I got to write a bunch of checks. How do you make sure that you have $0 in your trust account? Spreadsheet’s a pretty easy way to do that. Another example would be an asset allocation schedule, which would be in a family law situation where you’ve got a divorce worksheet where you’re dividing up assets between spouses. What’s nice about this is if I have a $425,000 marital home and the husband is going to get 40% of it, these are the only two things I have to put in. The rest of it all calculates itself. 

And of course it’ll do totals at the bottom and then grand totals all the way at the end. Just another example of an easy way in another practice area, maybe family lawyers are like, why would I use Excel? Well, there’s a good example, a medical bill summary. If you’re involved in litigation, you got to keep track of a bunch of medical bills for a case. Super great way to do that. And actually I found I want to show you real quick how to find here. This is a medical bill tracker. I got this for free. 

If you’re looking for a template in Excel, here’s a little good tip, just go file new. And you see here it says search for online templates. So let’s say I wanted an amortization schedule. I can just type amortization and hit go and it’ll show me amortization schedules. And if I wanted to use this one, watch how easy this is. I click on it, I click create, and it’s on my screen. It’s like one second. And now I’ve got a very sophisticated amortization schedule that I could use to calculate whatever. So there’s lots of free templates out there, all vetted by Microsoft. So don’t hesitate to look for one because a lot of ’em are quite good. This is not something I think people think about Excel for. You can actually calculate future dates based on whatever you want to add, months, weeks, days, it doesn’t matter. 

You can even identify if the future calculated date falls on a holiday or a weekend. You can actually have it automatically jump ahead to the next business day. There’s a function that does that. So that’s another thing that I don’t think people, if you’re going to got when this happens, let’s just take for example, a probate matter in Ohio. If I know the date of death of the decedent and the date the fiduciary was appointed, I can calculate every single due date that I have to worry about based on those two things. So I could have a spreadsheet where I punch in those two dates and then it just calculates the dates for me. Yeah, 

Stephanie Everett: 

That’s a cool, not a 

Barron Henley : 

Common use, but certainly does it. 

Stephanie Everett: 

Yeah, I don’t think many people are thinking about Excel for those things. And for those of you who are listening today and are like, what is Barron doing? I’ll just remind you that you should check out this podcast on our YouTube channel because he’s sharing his screen and walking you through some of these things and all these different ways. Lawyers use numbers a lot. It turns out we always like to say, oh, I’m a lawyer. I went to law school because I hate numbers. I don’t know if anyone’s heard that before. It’s one of my pet peeves because I’m like, eh. But a lot of our cases involve numbers and calculations, and I think this whole list that you’ve got going are great examples of, no, actually there’s a lot of things we need to calculate, financial numbers, calculations in our practice. 

Barron Henley : 

Here’s a really basic super simple example of something that’s helpful. I built this 10 years ago for a law firm in Canada, and they did probate work and they had to calculate taxes based on the value of the probate estate. And the managing partner of this particular firm was very frustrated that they kept screwing up the math. So she was just like, I know you’re an Excel geek. Can you just make me something? Here’s all the particulars. And she gave me the tax table. If I punch in a number there, it automatically calculates the tax. And then these, you only get one free one of these. So if I go 2, 2, 2 and three, it calculates that and gives ’em a total, I mean, it took like 15 minutes to put this together and they use it in every single estate and it makes sure nobody makes a mistake calculating things. That’s totally it, right? This is a simple stupid thing. If you have a routine calculation you have to do well, you could easily make a spreadsheet to do it, and it doesn’t make mistakes when it comes to the math and it’s easily shareable. Like any other file, of course you can look up, you can have whole tax tables in it. I’ll just show you another example of that. So here’s the entire tax table 

Stephanie Everett: 

It’s showing, and 

Barron Henley : 

There are 

Stephanie Everett: 

Functions, so we should tell people, it’s kind of showing if you make between zero and $10,000, this is your rate, and if you make this much, and for some of these taxes, it’s cumulative. So it actually needs to do more than just a straight line math. It’s actually doing multiple functions, right? 

Barron Henley : 

That’s right. And what’s happening, there’s functions that’ll actually, actually a new function called X lookup, the letter X-L-O-O-K-U-P, and it’s super easy, easier to use and more powerful than the V lookup, which here’s what we used to use for this thing. But you can basically tell it to go look up in a table based on whatever criteria and extract numbers from the table and then calculate stuff with them. And 

That’s what I was doing here. So whatever you enter for the taxable estate, it looks it up in the table and calculates the correct tax. And again, it doesn’t make mistakes, so that’s worth it. Time sheets, if people just want to have someplace that I can punch in time and have it automatically calculate what hours was I at work today? I showed up at this time, I went to lunch at this time, I came back at this time and I went home at that time. What’s the total? You can easily use spreadsheets for that. Here’s an issue. You can use Excel for that. I really don’t think many people think about. If you have a list of anything, Excel is great for handling lists because each worksheet has over 17 billion cells in it. I’m not even kidding. Sounds like a made up number, but it’s not. 

And you can have as many worksheets as you want in a workbook. So each one of them could have 17 billion cells. So let’s say I’ve got closed storage, my firm has old cases, and after they’re closed, I put ’em in a banker’s boxes and stick ’em in a used store someplace. How do you know what cases are in each banker’s box? Oh, a spreadsheet would be perfect for that. You got the holidays are coming up and you might want to send a Christmas slash hanukkah slash whatever holiday at the end of the year card to certain clients, and maybe you’ve got names, addresses and such, and you want to generate labels or envelopes or letters for each one of those that’s using. You’d be really marrying up Excel with Word in that case and doing what’s called a mail merge. If you use Microsoft Word and you look at the tabs across the top, you’ll see one called mailings. 

And in mailings there is a button that says Mail merge. And that would allow you to generate documents for each one of the, this is hard to explain, but it’s easy to understand what you see it. So let’s say I’m going to open up a spreadsheet that’s a data source. So what you’re seeing here is a list. So each row is a client. So let’s say I’m the client, me and my wife are the clients, and the lawyer is going to draft the power of attorney for me. So I put in what’s my gender, client gender, and if I put in male or female, it’ll calculate the pronouns. And then I say, who’s my initial agent name? My wife? What’s my wife’s address? What’s her phone number? Am I going to point a successor agent, yes or no? If yes, who is it? And then I’ll keep going out to the right. 

Do I have special instructions, yes or no? If yes, what are they? Do you know the date of execution? Sometimes I do, sometimes I don’t. What’s the city and county of execution? So basically the structure is there’s a column for each piece of data that needs to show up in your document. In order for a spreadsheet to be a data source, the only thing you have to remember are the following two things. The very top row are labels typically called a header row. Excel expects you to do that, and then it’s one record per row. So if I was going to do an entire estate plan this way, which you totally can do, and we’ve set up templates to do that, you can have one data source linked to multiple templates, and I might have certain columns that go into the will and certain columns that go into the power of attorney and certain columns that go into the trust and certain columns that go into the advanced directives, it’s totally fine. 

Remember, you’ve got 17 billion cells, you’re probably not going to run out. So once I get this set up, then I can link it to a document or a set of documents. So in this case, I’ve got, I’m going to go over to the mailings label or the mailings tab, and I can preview my results. I can scroll through ’em if I want, see it said Barron and then Jody. But if I want to generate a document, and by the way back here under select recipients or edit recipient list, I can see everybody in my spreadsheet and I can uncheck everyone and only check the one I want to run. If I had 500 clients in my spreadsheet, it’s easy to pick just one. I don’t have to run it for everybody. In this case, I am going to run it for everybody. Finish and merge, edit, okay, they’re done. 

I mean, literally as fast as I could click the button, those documents are finished. So here’s my power of attorney, and I did appoint a successor agent. As you can see, it’s all here. I did have special instructions and here they are, blah, blah, blah. And I did not answer the date. So it put in a formatted blank, which I decided how that would look, and it got the pronoun correct in the acknowledgement. Now, when I scroll down to my wife’s power of attorney, which immediately follows this, you can see it obviously got her name correct. She did not have a successor agent. And you can see there’s literally nothing here. That whole section just vaporized because I said no and she didn’t have special instructions. So that’s simply not here. But she did answer the date and it put in the date, and it also got the pronoun in her acknowledgement. 

That’s a pretty powerful thing. And maybe the holy grail of word processing, is there some way to answer a question once and have it go everywhere it needs to go? Yeah, it’s called mail Merch. And the data source, the easiest data source to set up is an Excel spreadsheet. You could share that with other people. It could be linked to as many templates as you need, and you’d never have to answer any of those questions twice. So if I have any list of anything, could be cases, could be whatever. You just want to keep track of what status something is in spreadsheet’s, good for that. 

But also if you want to generate documents, not something I think people think of Excel for, let’s say I have a table of numbers that has some calculations in it, and that table of numbers ultimately needs to show up in a Word document. Can you get them there from Excel? Yeah, in fact, there’s three ways to do it. I can either go into Excel and create a spreadsheet, has all my numbers in it, makes all the formulas, so it’s all calculating and I know it’s right. Then I can simply select copy and paste into Word and it brings it in as a plain table. Now, when it comes into Word as a plain table, it doesn’t have any functionality in terms of updating the numbers at that point. It’s just static numbers. They were updateable in Excel, but they’re not once they get to Word, because it just puts it in as a plain table with plain numbers and no formulas. However, you can also bury the entire spreadsheet in your Word document and retain the functionality of Excel, even though I’m in Word. 

So in other words, I drop it in, it looks like a table in Word, but if I double click the table, all the buttons that are in Excel, this is weird, open up in Word. All my ribbons from Excel will appear literally inside Word, and if I change any of the numbers, it automatically updates. And then when I click outside the table, it goes back to looking like just a table. I inserted into my Word document. At that point, the table has no connection to the original Excel file. In other words, I just made a copy of it and stuck it in this word file. But sometimes I just want my Word document to reflect whatever’s in the spreadsheet. In other words, I don’t want to put the spreadsheet in Word, I need the original. Someone else is working on the numbers in the spreadsheet. 

Let’s say my accounting department is constantly messing with the numbers, and these numbers need to show up in this Word document, which may be later. I’m going to make a PDF out and file with the government for some report. Okay, that’s a different thing. And I can do that as well. I can have a spreadsheet or a section of a spreadsheet and I can paste it into a Word document. And you can’t update it from Word, but if anybody makes a change to the spreadsheet, it instantly updates inside the Word document. It’s been inserted into. So I don’t even care what they’re doing with the spreadsheet. It’s always going to be right in my Word document. 

Stephanie Everett: 

Nice. 

Barron Henley : 

So that’s yet another thing you can do. And then another thing that I don’t think people think of is the idea that you can graph data if you want a pie chart or a bar chart, or I mean any kind of a graph you could possibly think of, that’s a core function of a spreadsheet. So any spreadsheet can do that. And then other stuff. How do I use Excel personally, for example? Well, let’s say the holidays are coming up. Guess what? They all happen at my house. So when the holidays come back, when they come around and everyone shows up and I have to prepare nine to 10 dishes for a whole bunch of people and have ’em all come out at the same time, I find that impossible to do unless I’ve got a spreadsheet set up as to when I put stuff in and when I take it out, I got two ovens and eight burners and I need to get all these things done at once. I can’t keep track of all that stuff without a spreadsheet. So for every Thanksgiving and Christmas, I make spreadsheets and I print ’em out and I hang them in my kitchen so I can keep on top of my schedule. Love it. So anyway, that’s another example of how you might use that. 

Stephanie Everett: 

Yeah, I think these are great reminders. And I guess the other thing I’d encourage people to do, I know sometimes the formulas, it can feel intimidating. I’m not sure which formula to use in Excel. I mean, this has actually been a really nice use of AI for me. Sometimes I’ll just go in to chat and be like, I’m in a spreadsheet and I have a number here and I have a date here and I want to calculate this and I want to do that, and then I want to do this other thing. How would I set it up? And it actually will tell you, well, there’s two ways you could set it up and put this number here and here’s the formula or whatever. You can copy and paste the formula right in, and it walks you through all the steps. I feel like I’m a little bit of a power user, probably not to your level, but maybe above the average. Joe and I have really upped my game with some of my formula work now 

Barron Henley : 

With 

Stephanie Everett: 

Chads Hill 

Barron Henley : 

And Copilot can help you with that or honestly 

Stephanie Everett: 

All of them. 

Barron Henley : 

If you do a search, if I go out and I do a search for Excel function, calculate date, holidays, weekends, just those words, I’ll immediately find the formula that can calculate a future date and skip holidays and weekends, and it’ll take me to probably Microsoft’s website. And they’ll have examples. A lot of times I read the textual explanation of something and I still don’t know what they’re talking about. I don’t know if my brain doesn’t process it right or what, but when you show me an example, I’m like, now I get it. 

Stephanie Everett: 

Yeah, perfect. 

Barron Henley : 

And there’s just a crazy amount of free help. Just recently I had a client, they had this massive spreadsheet for probate matters, and it was for the probate forms. They actually produced all the probate forms from Excel, which is a little weird, but they had giant spreadsheets for the estate checking accounts, and if it was an item of income or an expense, those needed to show up on different forms. And so they wanted to say, if it’s an expense, I need to show it up on this form, and if it’s income, it needs to show up on that form. And they had formulas built that do that. But the problem was you might have expense expense, income, income expense expense, and on the resulting of fields, you’d have blank lines, like my expenses. They weren’t all expenses, they weren’t all income. 

And for the ones that were one or the other, I’d end up with blank lines on the other thing. So all they wanted, they’re like, is there some way when I say expense that it shows up in the expense report but doesn’t have blank lines, just stacks. So they’re all clumped together. And I’m like, probably So I don’t know. Probably can do that. I mean, Excel can pretty much do anything I’ve ever thought of. So I went out and I had to research it for 20 minutes, but I ended up finding a video from some guy in the UK that was exactly, it was literally the exact use case. And I was like, oh my God, I can’t believe it. So I watched the video and I’m like, that just, of course once you see how to do it, you’re like, oh my God, that’s so easy if you know what to do. 

So I went to this spreadsheet, I’m like, there’s just no way. I just click, click, click. That just seemed too easy. It worked perfectly. I was like, that’s another example of I needed it to do something. And not once ever has Excel been incapable of doing whatever I was trying to figure out. That’s really the challenge of it. There’s a ton of things I want word to do that there’s no way it’ll do. There’s a ton of things that want Outlook to do. There’s no way Outlook’s going to do it, but I’ve never had that experience with Excel. 

Zack Glaser: 

There you 

Barron Henley : 

Go. If I could dream it up, there was some way to do it. And that’s kind of amazing. You think about all the software you’re constantly frustrated with because it won’t do what you want. And Excel pretty much checks every box. 

Stephanie Everett: 

Well, there you go. 

Barron Henley : 

It’s definitely something people should take better advantage of and learn how to incorporate into what they’re doing. And probably it would make everything go faster, better, easier. 

Stephanie Everett: 

I love it. On that, we will wrap this up, but encourage everyone to go check out Excel and maybe watch this podcast on YouTube. Barron just gave lots of examples. I know sometimes it’s hard to follow when you can’t see what he’s doing, but we definitely have the video available so you can see all the little tips and tricks, and it sounds like a lot of more people should be using Excel than they are. That’s my takeaway, no question. Yeah. Awesome. Thanks, Barron. 

Barron Henley : 

Okay. Yeah, 

Stephanie Everett: 

Thank you.