Honestly, doing the INDIRECT inside the MAP is probably more straightforward - I don’t think it even occurred to me! But the long-promised MAP / SINGLE video is coming! 😂

Yes, I got caught out by this before on another case. When you pick from cell, you have to match the entire format, not just the color. So if some cells have borders, or different fonts, or rotated text (these are all things that have come up in actual cases!) then they won’t be replaced. If you set the format directly, any properties you don’t set are like a wildcard - so if you set red background but don’t set any border, it will match a red background whatever borders it has or doesn’t have.

To be honest, I would say I still haven’t fully worked it out. There have definitely been times when I could see a clear single-cell approach and figured that would be faster, but I would have been better off to build a model that was much bigger but also much simpler. When the values of any row in the model you would be building only depend on the initial input, that definitely makes me more likely to lean toward single-cell (e.g. the cell you throw to in this case doesn’t change depending on how far ahead or behind you are). But if there are those kinds of interdependencies, then the formula is likely to require a pretty complex REDUCE - in that case, I’d only go single-cell if I needed a LAMBDA to use for more complex versions of the question on later levels. There is a middle ground, which I’ve played with but not yet used in the competition: I wrote a LAMBDA that can point at a model (built in a certain kind of way) and turn the workings of that model into a LAMBDA that reproduces it. Probably the coolest LAMBDA I’ve ever written! I’m planning to make some videos on my pre-made LAMBDAs soon-ish, so I’ll probably cover that one there.

@@DimEarly I am looking forward to seeing that video. I really am grateful that you share your knowledge with us. I enjoy learning from you and other competitors like Bo.

If you haven’t discovered him already, you’d probably enjoy Andrew Ngai’s videos too (he’s @Andrew_Ngai). He’s the 3x world champion, and he also has quite a different style to me and Bo.

@@DimEarly Yes I found him through you. I also watched your Bootcamp series, but afterwards I still wasnt comfortable with joining the competition, because I felt like an imposter. But after watching Road to las Vegas Round 1, I decided to give it a go and my aim was to qualify for the actual tournament. As I already did that, I also am thinking about joining the Financial modeling competition, even tho I am not an financial expert, But I want to learn and get a different perspective on finance topics in Excel. I really enjoy the esports cases and probably can learn a lot from the financial modeling cases too. Therefore I have some questions: Do you know, if I buy the "Ultimate Bundle - All Case Studies", do I also get a file like for the esports cases, where I can see the correct answers? Also I have all Esports cases. The Ultimate Bundle - All Case Studies "only" contains the financial Modelling cases right? Thank you in advance and I really appreciate what you are doing. It helps me develop my Excel skills, but also helps me as a person to develop and work on myself

Wow, so you qualified for Vegas on your second round ever? Impressive! Re: your questions - the FMWC cases are actually more helpful from a learning perspective, because they include worked solutions as well as the answers - I’m honestly not sure what’s in the bundle (I’ve entered everything as it’s come up, so I’ve never bought a bundle), but I think it may include both. I did a quick back-of-the-envelope calc, and with 34 (4+12+8+8+2) rounds from when the competition started to now x 3 cases per round x $20 per case, the predicscount price of all that should be just over $2k, but they show it as $3,560. I would suggest sending them a message to check - if they don’t have an FMWC-specific ultimate bundle, maybe they’ll give you a credit on the big one for what you already bought.