About Ask Eijaz
Practical Excel and data work for analytics, finance, operations and product teams — clear formulas, honest fixes, free workbooks, and books worth paying for.
Ask Eijaz publishes practical Excel and data work for the people who actually run the business — data and BI analysts, finance and accounting, operations, marketing, market research, and the project and product managers holding it all together. Anyone, in short, who inherits a spreadsheet they didn’t build and can’t quite trust.
What it covers
The centre of gravity is Excel applied to real work: reporting, reconciliation, revenue and lease accounting, commission and pricing models, lookups over messy logs, leaderboards that don’t lie. Around that sit the adjacent things the same job requires — data analytics and modelling, the reporting layer under BI dashboards, the metrics product and project teams are measured on, and the parts of AI worth knowing about because they now sit in the same toolchain.
Occasionally something non-technical turns up, because not everything interesting is a spreadsheet.
Why it exists
Most Excel writing falls into one of two piles. There’s the function reference that tells you the syntax and nothing at all about when you’d reach for it. And there’s the slick five-minute video solving a problem nobody actually has, on data that’s suspiciously tidy.
Almost none of it is written for the person with two lists that don’t agree, a deadline tomorrow, and a controller waiting for an answer.
That’s the gap. Everything here is aimed at it.
What you’ll find
Tutorials, free. Clear formulas, honest fixes, and a downloadable workbook attached to most of them so you can open the thing rather than retype it from a screenshot.
Books and workbooks, paid. Longer, deeper treatments of problems that genuinely need a hundred pages and a working model — reconciliation first. Everything paid comes with a companion .xlsx that is already built and already working, not a blank template.
How things are written here
A few rules that don’t change:
Every solution twice. One version for Excel 2016 and earlier, one for Excel 365 — because a great many functional/BU teams are on locked-down builds, and material that assumes the latest functions is useless to them. Each pair says which to use and what the older version gives up.
Formulas, not macros. Nothing here depends on VBA, Add-ins or Power Query, unless the article is explicitly about them. Formulas survive being emailed, opened on a restricted machine, and inherited by someone who has never met you.
No invented numbers. Figures in the books are computed from the companion workbook and checked by a build step that refuses to publish if a number can’t be traced back to the data. If a page says a payment is out by $6,845.86, you can open the file and find that row.
No padding. If something takes four paragraphs, it gets four paragraphs.
Who writes it
Eijaz Sheikh — a BI Manager with over two decades spent turning manual, month-end processes into things that run themselves, including nearly twelve years at NielsenIQ. He started out as a VBA developer, which is why spreadsheets never really went away.
The commercial bit
Products are sold through Dodo Payments as Merchant of Record, so tax and compliance are handled properly in every country, and you get a real invoice. Files are delivered instantly. Updates and corrections are free for life.
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Get in touch
Found an error, want a licence for your team, or think something here is wrong? Say so — corrections go into the next revision with a note.