Speaker – Diarmuid Early – The Active Cell

SPEAKER

Diarmuid Early

Diarmuid runs Early Days Consulting, specializing in financial modeling, reporting, and automation. Before starting Early Days, he worked as a business manager at Deutsche Bank for ten years in New York and London and started his career as a strategy consultant with the Boston Consulting Group in London.

Along with his industry experience, he has a Ph.D. in computer science and earned a CFA charter, which gives him a unique perspective as a financial modeler and trainer. Diarmuid is the reigning Excel world champion, and a three-time financial modeling world champion. He has been recognized as an MVP by Microsoft, and a Master Financial Modeler by the Financial Modeling Institute (one of only 8 so far).

Nov 30 | 9:00 AM - 10:00 AM

Improved Data Cleaning with Regular Expressions

If you’ve ever struggled with complex functions to clean up messy data in Excel, it’s time you learned Regular Expressions (or regex). Regex lets you find, replace, and organize data based on patterns.

Learning Objectives

During this session you’ll learn how to:

Standardize mixed dates: grab 7/17/26, 2026-07-17, and Jul 17th all in one go
Fix bad formatting: easily clean up names in unhelpful formats like LastFirst (no space!)
Audit errors: spot typos in manually entered email addresses, or missing digits in tracking numbers
Handle word and line boundaries naturally: match ‘red’, but not ‘bored’
Clean up junk: clear those weird not-a-space characters that some downloads come with (if you know, you know)

…and lots more.