Bill Gates using an early version of Microsoft Excel Flickr / Microsoft Sweden We've been writing a lot about Microsoft Excel formulas.

The program is the gold standard of programs. It's elegant, ubiquitous, and outstandingly powerful.

American business lives and dies by the spreadsheet, and everyone is always looking to hone their skills.

There's one trick, though, that separates the quants from the interns.

That trick is Index/Match, a function that can find any value in any spreadsheet.