In today's Between the Sheets, we’re sharing impressive highlights from the Global Excel Summit 2024.

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💚 Key Learnings from the Global Excel Summit

Regular "Between the Sheets" readers will know that the Global Excel Summit has just wrapped up in London. It's been a great week of connecting with fellow Excel enthusiasts and learning from the masters.

This year's theme was AI Exceleration.

I've had the pleasure of delivering the keynote speech, where I described my self-experiment of trying to master machine learning with only the help of AI. I had no prior knowledge on the subject, no practical experience. Spoiler: it didn't go well.

I was hoping ChatGPT would manage to teach me the core concepts and generate some Python scripts that I could implement in my project. But without a basic grasp of the subject, I had no way of verifying its output.

It was taking me nowhere.

Only after I took some time to actually learn about machine learning - from videos and articles written by (actual human) experts, I felt ready to take another crack at it.

Armed with this new knowledge, I used ChatGPT for coding help and its answers suddenly started making sense. Where it veered off course, I was able to steer it back to what I needed.

My takeaway from this experiment:

AI is a tool. I can use it to my advantage if I have a basic conceptual understanding of a topic.

Oz du Soleil and Victor Momoh echoed this sentiment during their panel:

AI shouldn't be used blindly. Experience still matters.

AI can speed up your work, but if you have no idea what you're asking about, it can also waste your time.

But the Summit wasn't just about AI. There were some enlightening sessions in the Finance & Accounting, Data Analytics & Visualization, and Power Stack tracks.

I wish I could share everything with you, but there're simply too many gems to fit in a single newsletter.

Here are my top insights:

We got to hear from Ian Bennett from PwC about the best practices when it comes to building transparent, robust, and flexible financial models in Excel. It was particularly interesting to learn about the "evil" features that should be avoided at all cost when modelling.

The highest risk comes from the usual suspects:

• circular references,
• volatile functions - OFFSET and INDIRECT,
• using custom number formats to change units.

They can lead to unexpected results or even errors, as well as negatively affect the performance of the workbook.

The medium risk list was a little more surprising. The features to be avoided with specific exceptions included pivot tables 😯.

After Ian's presentation, I asked him about this. He explained that when you filter or expand fields, the entire pivot table can expand and overlap elements in the cells below. Pivot Tables also don't update automatically and can increase the file size.

Also, the popular VLOOKUP and HLOOKUP are not recommended, although XLOOKUP is safe to use.

Carlos Barboza had a terrific session about interactive data visualization for decision support.

He showed some amazing examples of charts that you can filter and change on the fly based on the stakeholder's questions and needs.

He stressed that the key is to reduce the mental effort for your audience. They should be able to quickly see the insights they are interested in.

Carlos also shared an inspiring resource for anyone interested in visualizing data (and not afraid of a little VBA) - Clearly and Simply, a blog by Robert Mundigl, who's a true charts & dashboards wizard.

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The Summit also gave us a great opportunity to get the business user's perspective.

We've seen a presentation from Marie Bernard and Grégory Dupuy from Chanel's Process Automation team. I'm so glad they accepted our invite to join the conference and share how they operate and solve automation problems.

This is how we first met: Chanel reached out to us a few years ago, interested in buying our Master Excel Power Query course for their team. They got corporate licenses and since then, they've been applying what they learned to make smart changes at work. They used Power Query to replace manual processes and were able to save a significant amount of time.

Part of their strategy is empowering users to create their own low code/no code automations via Power Query training.

Their team is compared to speedboats that quickly solve specific problems, while the IT departments are the large (and slow) ships that deliver long-term large-scale projects.

It's inspiring to see such innovation in a company considering it's from a traditional industry. Gregory attributed this innovativeness to the company's core value of creativity.

I'm really happy to see our Power Query course play a role in Chanel's success story. It's rewarding to know it made a difference.

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This is just a drop in the sea of amazing demos, presentations and lessons the summit offered.

But the best part was the chance to meet with you - people who are enthusiastic about Excel, fellow Excel trainers and power users.

We got to exchange perspectives and chat about some of the most frustrating data problems.

During our small-talks, we also noticed some recurring questions about Power Query. For example, how to correctly connect to a SharePoint source, or how to extract data from PDFs. The latter can be particularly tricky.

We've covered these topics in the Automate with Power Query course, which in a large part was inspired by problems sent in by our members.

👩‍🏫 Webinar

I was supposed to wrap up the Summit with a webinar on Corporate Charts Inspired by Social Media. Unfortunately, we've run into some technical issues with audio (not just because of me losing my voice), so we had to scrap the demo I've prepared.

Instead, we've had an entertaining Q&A session thanks to the stellar hosting skills of my fellow MVP, Liam Bastick. It's always fun with Liam!

It was another opportunity to connect with you. Thank you for all the questions.

And as promised, I will repeat the webinar proper at a later date (aiming for early March). I will record it for those who won't be able to attend live.

Once we confirm the new date, we will share the details here in the newsletter, as well as in all the usual spaces.

Anybody who attended the original session will also be notified via email by the Global Excel Summit organizers.

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A big shout-out and thank you to cherryware for their support in sponsoring today's newsletter. 😊

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🤓 Geeky News

➰ Turn your table into a Kanban board in Loop

Loop has had a Kanban template for a while. Now they've added the ability to transform tables into boards as well.

If you're tracking tasks in a table, as long as it has a Label column, you can now easily switch views between table (to see all the detail) and board (for a quick progress overview).

Currently you can choose between the following label groups: Progress, Priority, Kanban, Team Retrospective. You can also create your own and customize the options in each.

💬 Teams meeting chat in Outlook

The new Outlook now has the chat feature. When a Teams meeting is created and added to your calendar, you can access it from Teams as well as Outlook. Now you can also access meeting chat. It's available in calendar peek, meeting details, context menu, My Day, and reminder. A quick way to notify your colleagues when you're running late 😉

🤖 Google Bard is now Gemini

Microsoft doesn't have a monopoly on constant rebranding of its AI products. This time Google is renaming Bard to Gemini. It's based on Google's latest large language model, Gemini Ultra 1.0.

Also, Google starts offering a premium paid tier, with access to Gemini Advanced - their answer to ChatGPT Plus and at a similar price.

In the Excel world, we mainly talk about the OpenAI model and its iterations (ChatGPT/Copilot) - somebody even remarked on it during the Global Summit 🤫 - but that doesn't mean that the competition is sleeping. It's a quickly developing landscape.

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👏 Power Stories

It's great to see the alumni of XelPlus courses claiming their hard-earned badges. You can add them to your LinkedIn profile to show off your credentials to employers and peers.

Got a success story about using your XelPlus skills? I’d love to hear it! Hit reply to share the details, and inspire other students. 😇

See you next week,

Leila

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