Editorial standards

Who is accountable

FormulaSmith is operated by Sören Striewski, who is named in thelegal notice and is responsible for every editorial decision described below. There is no anonymous editorial team: one person maintains the profile library, and corrections go to that person.

What is hand-written and what is generated

This is the distinction that matters most, and the one most sites in this field are vague about.

Hand-written: the profile library. That is 202 function references, 92 operation profiles, and the error, shortcut, VBA and function-combination profiles alongside them. Each carries its own exact answer, explanation, worked example with real numbers, steps, common mistakes and FAQ. Everything a reader would call the substance of a page lives here and was typed by a person.

Generated: the 3,470 published guide pages are assembled from those profiles by a deterministic template engine — it selects the matching profile for a search phrase, adapts the connecting sentences to that phrase, and renders the page. It is a template engine, not a language model: the same input always produces the same output, and it cannot invent a fact that is not in the profile it was given.

Also hand-written: the 50 calculators, the cheat sheets, the practice datasets, and pages like this one.

How formulas are verified

• Every formula printed in a profile is run in both Excel and Google Sheets before that profile ships, because the two disagree more often than people expect — argument separators, function availability, and date handling all differ.
• The calculators are covered by unit tests that assert their arithmetic against worked examples, so a refactor cannot silently change a result.
• Version-specific functions carry an explicit availability note. A formula that returns #NAME? in Excel 2019 says so on the page rather than leaving the reader to discover it.
• Where Windows and Mac differ, both are shown. The site remembers which you picked.

What is checked before anything publishes

A build does not ship unless it passes an automated gate suite that runs over the entire page corpus. Among other things it fails the build on: near-duplicate pages across different topics, pages under a minimum substance threshold, orphaned pages no navigation reaches, broken internal links, missing or conflicting canonical tags, and untranslated English text leaking into a non-English page.

These are not aspirations. They run on every build and block it, which is why the corpus does not contain the thin near-duplicate pages that programmatic content is prone to.

Known limitations

Stating these is part of the point of this page.

• Only the English pages are submitted for indexing. Other languages exist but are marked noindex, because their translations have not yet reached a standard we would stand behind.
• Screenshots are not yet part of the guide pages. Steps are described in text with exact ribbon paths and key combinations.
• Microsoft ships new functions continuously. A profile states the version requirement as understood at the time it was reviewed; the review date on each page tells you how current that is.
• Where a page covers a task rather than a function, the ribbon path may differ slightly between Microsoft 365 update channels.

Corrections

The feedback button on every page sends your message with the page URL attached. Factual errors are fixed in the profile, which corrects every page built from it at once — one fix, not a hunt through search results. Corrections change the review date shown at the foot of the affected pages.

Independence

No content is sold, and no recommendation is influenced by a commercial relationship. Affiliate links, where they appear, are marked and explained on theaffiliate disclosure page. The tools are free and require no account; the practice data and cheat sheets are free and ungated. Where a page mentions our own templates, it does so because the template does the job the page describes — and the page tells you how to do it without buying anything.

Questions