About

Before Excel, Lotus123 was the spreadsheet of choice.
Today, our muscle memory is still trained to use these keyboard shortcuts:
/+e+c to copy cells.
/+e+s+v to paste special values.

In our first fulltime job, half the job involved filling in official forms.
These forms were meant to be hand filled or typed. Instead of hand filling the forms, Lotus123 keystroke macros were meticulously created to populate and print the forms. Lotus123 really came through after hours spent learning how to exactly line up the paper forms in the rollers of a dot matrix printer. From that point we were hooked on automation and macros. And so began our path to Excel, VBA, Power Query and Power BI.

The solutions offered across multiple projects were the Rolls Royce solution, a mid-range solution and the way cheaper Excel and VBA solution. The budget option usually won through, especially when the spec was an evolving work in progress.
But less than a decade ago everything started to change.

Power Query, once an add-in was embedded into Excel.
Excel functions only returning a single value for so long, now returned arrays.

Year after year the product functionality grew. Slowly VBA solutions were replaced by queries and formulas. Today ninety percent of a solution is queries, dynamic array formulas and pivots.

There was a sea change to Excel when VBA was added to Excel 5.0 In Excel 2016 Power Query was added and Dynamic Arrays with Excel 365.

We are living through another sea change!

Why

This site has been built to help us learn new things.
We can use it as a handy guide whenever needed.
It is also public, open to everyone who wants to learn as well.

Who is behind this site

Robert

Excel is his hammer.
He can coax Excel into doing wonders with a query or formula. Dynamic Arrays and M are competing for his time.

John

Power BI sings a siren song.
The reports that can be built. But, Oh, all that data needs wrangling. Behind every great report lies a well-designed star schema. M and DAX are reshaping his world view.

The Meerkats

Always curious.
With their noses deep in a book or blog post, eager to learn more.
Wondering why this site isn’t about ML?

How do you say the site name

The easy way.
Say Learns as in “Robert learns to read.”.
Say Mother as is “My Mother is meditating.”.

Now replace the L of Learns with the M from Mother.
And there you are; Mearns.

The official way.
Using the International Phonetic Alphabet to pronounce Mearns.
You can go two ways /Mɜ:nz/ or Mɜ:rnz
Breaking that down:

The ɜ: is used in words like burn (bɜ:n) and term (tɜ:m).
The r varies in distinctness depending on the speaker.

The best example is in the statement, “I like to learn.”

Learn -> Learns -> Mearns

and working backwards

Mearns Learns