For the past thirteen years or so I have spent just about every hour of every working day in Excel. I guess that you could call that an occupational hazard for an accountant.
Occasionally I manage to learn a new trick. Just recently I found out that you can use wildcards in vlookup formulas [^]. Wildcards are “*” and “?”, where ? replace any one character, and * replaces any number of characters.
All of a sudden you wonder how you managed to get by without it. You do need to be careful about where you use this, but it does save some gymnastics where there are slight differences in the two values.