Why Excel is a valuable skill for finance professionals in the age of AI
Key takeaways
Excel remains a valuable skill for finance professionals in the age of AI because strong technical knowledge helps users work more efficiently, validate outputs, and challenge assumptions.
- A 2026 CFA Institute survey found that 51% of finance professionals considered Excel proficiency important for new entrants to perform confidently from day one.
- AI can support data preparation, reconciliation, modeling, and automation, but users still need to understand how results were produced.
- Excel expertise helps finance professionals identify errors, maintain audit trails, and assess whether AI-generated formulas or analysis make sense.
By Fay Bordbar
Finance professionals have used Excel for decades, and while AI is changing how they use it, Excel skills matter as much as ever. Discover why Excel skills are still important, which ones finance professionals need to advance their careers, and how Excel is used across finance.
In 1985, Back to the Future hit movie theaters, the wreck of the Titanic was discovered, and Coca-Cola replaced its classic formula with New Coke, triggering a huge public backlash. It was also the year that Microsoft Excel was released for the Mac.
It’s hard to imagine a time when Excel wasn’t around; it’s now one of the most widely used business tools, with hundreds of millions of users worldwide.
More than 40 years since its launch, it’s still a tool employers in finance highly value. And the rapid growth of AI hasn’t changed that. A 2026 CFA Institute survey of finance professionals found that 51% considered Excel proficiency an important technical skill for new entrants to be able to perform confidently from day one.
So, if you’re looking to advance your career in finance and thought Excel was becoming less relevant, think again.
Why does Excel still matter in finance?
Excel has evolved far beyond its original role as a tool for organizing, calculating, and analyzing data. Today, finance professionals use it for everything from data analysis and financial modeling to automation.
AI is changing how finance professionals use Excel, helping them work faster and automate repetitive tasks. But Excel skills still matter because the better you understand Excel, the more effectively you can use AI alongside it.
You can see this in many common finance tasks. Take data preparation and reconciliation. AI can help clean and standardize messy data from different sources and identify likely matches when records don't line up perfectly. But you still need the Excel expertise to check the results, understand how the data has been changed, and keep an audit trail of those changes.
The same applies to more complex tasks. AI can help build a three-statement model linking a company’s income statement, balance sheet, and cash flow statement. But understanding how the model should work makes it much easier to check the output, challenge assumptions, and spot when something isn’t right.
So, if Excel knowledge still matters in the age of AI, what does being a skilled Excel user actually look like?
What Excel skills do finance professionals need?
Strong Excel skills for finance are increasingly about combining technical knowledge with judgment. Finance professionals need to know what they want AI or Excel to do, how the output should be structured, and how to check whether the result is reliable.
Financial models rarely stay the same and are rarely used only by the person who built them. They often need to incorporate new data or changing circumstances, test for different scenarios, or be reviewed and updated by colleagues and clients. That means the way a spreadsheet is structured is just as important as the formulas used.
To be considered an advanced user, you’re typically comfortable with:
- Analyzing and managing financial data: Working with large or complex datasets, using functions such as XLOOKUP, FILTER, and UNIQUE and tools such as Power Query to bring together, structure, and analyze information.
- Building structured, auditable financial models: Creating models that turn financial data and assumptions into forecasts or other outputs, while structuring them so the logic is clear and the model can be easily followed.
- Building flexible scenario and sensitivity analysis: Creating models that make it easy to change key assumptions and see how those changes affect outcomes.
- Automating and streamlining workflows: Using shortcuts, templates, automation, AI, and more advanced Excel functionality to reduce repetitive manual work.
- Checking and challenging results: Building checks into models, reviewing calculations and assumptions, and making sure the results make sense. This is particularly important when using AI to help with formulas or analysis.
- Creating models that others can use: Designing workbooks that are clear, maintainable, and easy for colleagues and clients to understand, review, and adapt, rather than building solutions that only make sense to just one person.
You won’t necessarily use all these skills. Which ones matter most to you will depend on the type of finance work you do.
How is Excel used in finance?
Excel is used across a wide range of finance roles and tasks, from analyzing investments and building financial models to forecasting, reporting, and managing data. Here are a few examples of what that can look like in practice.
Valuation and investment analysis: Equity research and investment analysts can use Excel to build company valuation models, test how changes in assumptions affect valuations, and compare investment opportunities across companies or sectors.
Planning and forecasting: Financial planning and analysis (FP&A) teams can use Excel for budgeting, forecasting, cash flow and workforce planning, and business performance reporting.
Management accounting and reporting: Excel can be used to produce monthly management reports, analyze financial performance, and automate recurring reporting tasks.
How can you improve your Excel skills?
There’s no real finish line when it comes to Excel. Even the most proficient users keep finding new ways to solve problems. When you finish a task, don't just ask, “does it work?” Ask whether there was a better way to do it.
A useful habit is to revisit the Excel tasks you perform regularly and ask questions such as: could a manual process be automated? Could a model be structured in a way that makes it easier for someone else to understand or update? You can also use AI to explore alternative approaches.
Looking at how experienced Excel users approached a similar task can also help uncover techniques you may not have considered.
“Take one case, do it on your own, and then watch as many videos on exactly that case as possible, and see how different people attempt it,” says Pieter Pienaar, winner of the Microsoft Excel Collegiate Challenge 2025.
The growing Excel community offers plenty of opportunities to do that. You can find walkthroughs and tutorials on YouTube, including videos from Dim Early, 2025 Microsoft Excel World Champion, and compare how other Excel users approach different problems.
Another way to challenge yourself further is through Excel competitions. The Microsoft Excel World Championship is aimed at professional competitors, while the Microsoft Excel Collegiate Challenge gives university students the opportunity to compete and develop their skills. Participants are given unfamiliar scenarios and challenged to solve them using Excel.
If you’re not quite ready to compete, CFA Institute’s Excel Skills for Finance Professionals learning hub is another way to build your skills. It includes tutorials and videos designed for financial analysts created by me and Giles Male. We are both Microsoft Excel MVPs, experts recognized by Microsoft for sharing our Excel knowledge with the wider community. Plus, more tips from the Excel World Champions.
Concluding thoughts
AI is changing how finance professionals use Excel, but it is not removing the need to understand the data, assumptions, and logic behind financial analysis. Strong Excel skills help professionals use AI more effectively, verify its output, and build models and workflows that others can understand and trust. The combination of Excel knowledge, financial judgment, and AI capability is likely to become more valuable as finance workflows continue to evolve.
CFA Institute is a proud sponsor of the Microsoft Excel World Championship (MWEC) and the Microsoft Excel Collegiate Challenge (MECC) 2026. For more practical advice on developing your skills, explore our Excel Skills for Finance professionals' hub, which includes articles, learning videos, tips and insights from the world champions.
More in this series
You may also be interested
02 Sep 2026
You can ace the test and still can't do the job
08 Jul 2026
How to make a mentoring relationship work
Explore our programs and certificates
CFA Institute offers a diverse range of programs and certificates designed to meet the needs of finance professionals across various career stages and specializations.
