The person who made Excel look like design.

Joshua Cottrell-Schloemer — often known simply as Josh Cottrell-Schloemer or by the brand Big Excel Energy — is a data communications designer and Excel design expert. He teaches and practices the craft of making spreadsheets, dashboards, and reports look polished, modern, and presentation-ready.

He is the creator of Big Excel Energy and the free weekly Excel + Design newsletter, where every issue includes a beautifully designed, ready-to-use Excel template. His Excel design files have been downloaded nearly one million times, he has been named a Microsoft Excel MVP twice, and he reaches 480,000 followers on TikTok as @bigexcelenergy.

Before Big Excel Energy, Josh cofounded Market.space, a competitive-intelligence platform he started in 2014 and that was acquired in 2016 — two years from idea to acquisition. That work is the reason he thinks in dashboards instead of decks. He went on to consult on data-heavy products and, by 2022, was building a large public audience specifically around Excel as a visual design medium.

Today he helps F500 brands and small startups make their data actually matter — using communication, psychology, and design. He has worked with teams at Microsoft, Kellogg's, Philips, and Novo Nordisk, among others.

Josh's signature idea is simple: ugly dashboards don't get used. A report that's hard to read is a report nobody acts on. So he applies layout, typography, visual hierarchy, chart design, and interface patterns to Excel workbooks — the same craft you'd expect from a product designer, pointed at the spreadsheet most teams already live in.

People describe the result as "making Excel look less like Excel." It's the throughline across everything he publishes: the templates, the newsletter, the dashboard reviews, and the consulting.

Josh works with brands and analytics teams who want their Excel dashboards and reports to look designed. Engagements range from quick async dashboard reviews to template customization to full consulting.