XelPlus is a leading online education company, providing training courses for Excel, Power BI, Finance, and Google Sheets. XelPlusโ bestselling courses are popular among financial analysts, CFOโs, and business owners. Technology is changing fast. We help our members turn confusion into confidence with every skill learnt.
Hi there! You're reading Between the Sheets, your weekly dose of productivity and insights. If you were forwarded this message, you can get the free weekly email here.
Today we're covering:
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Making your budget, actuals, and previous year figures tell their story just got easier!
You see, it can be tough to show budget, actual, and prior year's data neatly in just one view.
How do we best display all these critical numbers and their variances without creating a cluttered and overwhelming report?
โIn my latest video, I guide you through each step of setting up an interactive Excel dashboard.
The biggest hurdle is usually the start.
How do we properly bring data over from other sheets and link them to our drop-down selection?
In real-world scenarios data structures typically involve multiple lookup values. Not just one. So what's the solution when a simple VLOOKUP or XLOOKUP doesn't work? At the start of the video, I'll show you how to smoothly navigate this challenge.
Here's what we'll cover:
You'll see that creating professional-looking charts in Excel is possible but can be a bit fiddly. It takes some manual adjustments to clean and line everything up.
An easier way to create impressive dashboards is by using Zebra BI for Office.
This user-friendly add-in swiftly generates fully dynamic and responsive charts (variance calculations included!), simplifying advanced data analysis for you. Moreover, it's IBCS*-certified, ensuring your reports are consistent and professional across various platforms (also available for Power BI).
*International Business Communication Standards are globally recognized guidelines for the effective presentation and visualization of business information. Its key principles state that business visualizations should be clear, concise, consistent. This is what you should always aim for in your dashboards. You can now outsource it to Zebra BI ๐ฆ ๐.
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The Explore feature (currently in public preview) offers Power BI users a lightweight, focused experience for ad-hoc data exploration.
If an existing report doesn't answer your questions, you can now quickly create matrix/visual pairs from the underlying data.
Simply add the relevant fields in the Explore window, like you would when creating a pivot table in Excel. Power BI will generate a matrix and suggest a visual that best fits the selected data. You can then save and share your exploration.
This should be particularly useful for business users who need quick insights or specific data points for presentations without the complexity of full report creation.
By the way, if you're wondering how Excel and Power BI stack up against one another, we just created a cheat sheet for you.
It compares the two apps by cost, target group, sharing potential, flexibility, visualizations etc.
โDownload Cheat Sheet |
Feel free to share it with your colleagues. We have so many different apps and options to work with these days. A simple comparison like this can be super helpful.
The Windows Photos app is getting some welcome improvements (currently available to Windows Insiders).
You will soon be able to remove photo backgrounds with a single click. You can leave it transparent or replace with a solid color.
The app now supports sharing individual photos saved on OneDrive, enabling users to copy photo links or send them via email directly from the app.
The whole experience has been redesigned based on user feedback, including easier printing and timeline scrollbar.
A while ago, Microsoft introduced Clipchamp, an online video editing app that simplifies creating professional-looking videos.
โIt is now generally available to commercial customers (with Microsoft 365 Enterprise and Business licenses).
Clipchamp is integrated with other Microsoft 365 productivity apps, which makes sharing the produced videos easy. You can share via Stream, Teams, Outlook, depending on your needs.
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We're genuinely grateful for the opportunity to be part of your professional journey.
A special shout-out to Shawn for his diligent work in completing the Fundamentals of Financial Analysis course and for his generous feedback.
Got a success story about using your XelPlus skills? Iโd love to hear it! Hit reply to share the details, and inspire other students ๐
See you next week,
Leila๏ธ
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Helping you easily overcome data challenges with Excel & Power BI
XelPlus is a leading online education company, providing training courses for Excel, Power BI, Finance, and Google Sheets. XelPlusโ bestselling courses are popular among financial analysts, CFOโs, and business owners. Technology is changing fast. We help our members turn confusion into confidence with every skill learnt.
Thinking VLOOKUP is dead now that we have XLOOKUP? Think again. It's still used across thousands of spreadsheets. It has some limitations, but if you're aware of them and use it correctly, you'll get the job done quickly. Also, this edition of Between the Sheets includes: Power tools making a difference Better technical answers from ChatGPT Solution for tab hoarders If you were forwarded this message, you can get the free weekly email here. ๐ฌ Master VLOOKUP for effortless reporting In my...
Today, we're diving deeper into Excel's View tab to show you some lesser-known, yet incredibly handy features that will change the way you manage your workbooks. Also in focus: sharing views in Excel for the web AI writing assist in any online text box OneDrive offline capabilities If you were forwarded this message, you can get the free weekly email here. Master the Window options in Excel's View tab A while ago we covered the magic of Freeze Panes. But there are other buttons in the View...
Weโre almost done with our New Excel Business Charts Course and itโs looking great! I'm currently reviewing the final videos. Meanwhile, the team is busy finalizing the cheat sheets, lesson notes, and quick guides. This morning, I reviewed the lecture "How to Pick the Right Chart". And wow! It took me right back to my corporate job, staring at the screen, wondering, "How on earth do I make this data tell a story?!". There was SO MUCH to show. Picking the right chart might seem easy, but...