One thing I hear constantly as an Excel consultant and trainer is some version of this question:
I’ve heard about these new features, but I don’t know when to use them. What are the use cases?
It’s a reasonable question. It sounds practical and responsible, like you’re trying to avoid wasting time on tools you don’t actually need. But in practice, it often sends people in the wrong direction.
The problem is rarely a lack of use cases. If anything, there are too many. “Use cases” quickly turn into checklists, and checklists are a poor fit for how real Excel work actually happens. They work well for demos and tidy examples, where the data is clean, the steps are known in advance, and the outcome is predetermined.
That is not most people’s day-to-day reality.
Most Excel work lives in the messy middle. It shifts slightly every time you touch it. It involves judgment calls, partial information, interruptions, revisions, and small workarounds that quietly pile up over weeks or years. No static list of use cases survives in that environment for long.
That’s why I don’t recommend starting with use cases at all.
A better place to start is friction.
Why use cases help, but only up to a point
It is reasonable to want a rough mental map of how tools generally line up with tasks. Having a sense of which features tend to help with shaping data, summarizing it, exploring logic, or doing deeper analysis is genuinely useful. It reduces cognitive load and gives you an orientation.
Where things go sideways is when “what are the use cases?” becomes the main justification for learning a tool at all.
Real Excel work doesn’t stay neatly categorized. It arrives as messy inputs, evolving questions, and follow-ups that quietly change what the task even is. That’s also why learning the basics of new features slightly detached from your own immediate use case is often more effective. Without the pressure of current deadlines and data quirks, you can see what a tool is fundamentally good at, where it starts to strain, and how it behaves when assumptions change.
Use cases are a helpful orientation. They’re just not a great destination.
What actually builds Excel judgment is noticing friction: when formulas get brittle, when manual steps multiply, or when workarounds start demanding more explanation than the result itself.
What friction actually looks like
Friction rarely shows up as a big failure. More often, it looks like small, recurring annoyances you’ve learned to work around.
- A task that technically works, but always takes longer than it should.
- A file you hesitate to touch because you’re not fully sure why it works.
- An analysis you rebuild over and over with small changes.
- A cleanup step you redo every time because you don’t quite trust last month’s version.
None of this means you’re doing bad work. These are simply signals that your current approach is carrying hidden costs in time, attention, or confidence.
If you learn to notice those signals early, you can improve things before urgency forces your hand.
Noticing patterns, not picking tools
At this point, people often ask for a decision tree. Something like, “If this happens, use that.”
I’m intentionally not doing that here.
Real Excel work is too contextual, too entangled with people, deadlines, and imperfect data for decision trees to hold up for long. They create a sense of certainty that disappears the moment something changes.
What actually transfers from one situation to the next is judgment. And judgment comes from noticing patterns in your own work.
Some friction comes from repetition. Some from fragility. Some from cognitive load. Some from having to explain the same thing again and again. Once you can name what kind of friction you’re experiencing, the direction of a better approach usually becomes clearer without needing a prescription.
Using the tracker to surface those patterns
I’ve embedded a simple Excel tracker you can download and reuse below. Each row represents a task or analysis you do repeatedly. The columns prompt you to reflect on where friction shows up and what it feels like.
There are no tool columns on purpose. No branching logic. No instructions about what to use next.
The goal is simply to make patterns visible. When you fill in a handful of rows, you’ll often notice that certain types of friction keep recurring. That’s your signal that it’s worth slowing down and experimenting with how you work, not just what you produce.
Learning by proximity, not pressure
One of the most effective ways to grow your Excel judgment is not by chasing use cases, but by staying close to the ecosystem.
Pay attention to how experienced practitioners talk about problems, not just solutions. Notice the kinds of situations where people say, “This started fine, but then…” Follow MVPs and practitioners whose work resonates with yours. Skim, watch, absorb.
Over time, you build an internal sense of what’s possible and what’s worth reaching for, without needing to force a decision in the moment.
That kind of gradual immersion is far more durable than trying to map every task to a tool up front.
Try this for a week
Download the tracker, duplicate it, and fill in five to ten tasks from your own week. Don’t rush to change anything. Just notice where friction shows up and what kind of friction it is.
That awareness compounds.
And once you have it, deciding how to evolve your Excel work becomes a lot calmer and a lot more intentional.
If this way of thinking resonates, I describe how I work with individuals and teams who want to build more durable Excel systems on my How I Work page:
Friction is feedback. Learning to listen to it is a more durable skill than any checklist.