Your 2026 Data Detox Challenge
Right now, your social feed is filled with health and wellness initiatives. You can’t scroll without being bombarded with the latest closet purge, anti-inflammatory diet detox, or kitchen clean-out.
In fact, let’s focus on that kitchen, shall we? Your kitchen might be filled with half-used jars of condiments, expired spices you only needed once and the ever-popular mystery containers (what was in there again??). Every time you need to cook, you waste time. Your searching, second guessing and (gulp) using the wrong ingredient (don’t mistake cumin for cinnamon, whatever you do) prevent you from making that masterpiece you’ve been hungry for.
Is your data that much different?
Messy data is exactly like that messy kitchen. You spend time searching through the disorganized, outdated, and duplicated data points in your technology pantry, and you end up with the wrong recipe entirely.
This doesn’t just lead to a flattened data souffle or undercooked tech pot roast.
In your organization, this chaos leads to delays, errors, revision of work, loss of trust, and missed opportunities. Your team spends their valuable time validating numbers instead of interpreting them. Looking through their work multiple times instead of one review, losing confidence with each error found. Your clients return reports with obvious errors that were overlooked due to pressing deadlines.
This is not a happy tech kitchen.
With more and more collaboration, data sources multiplied across tools and departments, you need to address inconsistencies before they sink your projects. What should be a fast path to insight becomes a time consuming chore that taxes your resources and your stress levels.
The good news is that Microsoft has tools to help you with your data detox, organizing and automating along the way.
Power Query lets you clean, reshape, filter, merge, and transform data with simple clicks instead of manual formulas. You can refresh that query to repeat when new data arrives. This can remove repetitive work and reduce human error.
Once you build that query, you can refresh it over and over, saving hours every month. What can you do with those hours?? Don’t answer yet, keep reading.
Power Query integrates with Excel, Power BI, cloud services, databases, CRMs. Sharepoint and more, making it a flexible option for nearly any business workflow.
With the preservation of original data, Power Query simply applies defined steps and allows you to update reports in real time by updating the queries. I smell the aroma of accuracy and consistency in this kitchen, don’t you?
So if looks a lot more like what you’d like to cook up this year, let’s hear it. Contact us at support@excelandflourish.com for our training options to help you keep that tech kitchen sparkly clean and cooking with gas.
Bon appetite. *chef’s kiss*