TEXTJOIN replaces CONCATENATE with a single function that accepts a range, writes the delimiter once, and skips blank cells automatically with one TRUE/FALSE argument. This guide covers six practical examples — from comma-separated lists and address building through conditional joins with IF, date formatting with TEXT(), and line-break separators using CHAR(10).

WORKDAY takes a start date and a number of working days, and returns the exact deadline date — automatically skipping weekends and any holidays you provide. It is the companion to NETWORKDAYS: use NETWORKDAYS to count elapsed working days, and WORKDAY to find what date falls N working days in the future or past. This guide covers forward planning, backward planning, invoice due dates, delivery chains, WORKDAY.INTL for custom working weeks, and the workday-check formula trick.

NETWORKDAYS counts the working days between two dates, automatically skipping weekends and subtracting any public holidays you provide. It is the essential function for project timelines, payroll calculations, SLA monitoring, and monthly capacity planning. This guide covers both NETWORKDAYS and NETWORKDAYS.INTL with six practical examples — from basic counts through custom weekend definitions for global businesses.

CHOOSE is one of Excel’s most versatile and most overlooked functions — it picks a value from a list by position number, and because that number can come from a dropdown or a formula, the result changes dynamically. Unlike FILTER, SORT, and XLOOKUP, CHOOSE works in every Excel version from 2003 to 365 with no dynamic array support required. This guide covers six practical examples including scenario models, day names, VLOOKUP table switching, quarter labels, and the classic left-lookup trick.

XMATCH does everything MATCH does, but better. It defaults to exact match so you never accidentally return a wrong result, can find the last occurrence in a list, supports wildcards in a dedicated mode, and adds next-larger approximate matching that MATCH cannot do at all. This guide covers the full syntax, a direct comparison table, and six examples from basic position lookup through two-way INDEX+XMATCH and binary search on large datasets.

The SORT function creates a sorted copy of your data in a new location, leaves the original completely untouched, and updates automatically whenever the source changes. This guide covers the full syntax, the SORTBY companion function, and six practical examples — from simple A-Z lists to multi-column sorts, dynamic filtered views, and randomizing a list with RANDARRAY.