XelPlus is a leading online education company, providing training courses for Excel, Power BI, Finance, and Google Sheets. XelPlus’ bestselling courses are popular among financial analysts, CFO’s, and business owners. Technology is changing fast. We help our members turn confusion into confidence with every skill learnt.
Are they actually connected?
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You’re tracking the numbers. But do they mean anything? 📚 More hours studying. 📈 More money on ads. 💤 More steps before bed. Are they actually making a difference, or are you just hoping they are? Most people guess. Smart ones use a simple Excel function to find out. It’s called RSQ, and it tells you how much one thing affects another. Never heard of it? You’re not alone. We ran a quiz last week and only 10% of our community got it right. 👀 When you do get it, everything changes. No more gut feel or eyeballing charts. Just clear, math-backed answer to: “How much of an impact is it making?” We break it down in our blog post:
📁 Free workbook so you can try it right now. The second you use it, you'll stop guessing—and start seeing the truth behind your numbers. 🤓 Geeky News📊 Excel Data Types now more visibleData Types in Excel let you pull extra info about: 💱 Currencies 🏦 Stocks 🗺️ Geography Example: Enter a currency pair like Cells with these data types get a slick little icon, so you know they’re “special.” Click it, and a whole preview panel opens up with hidden info inside. But up till now, the formula bar stayed totally clueless. That’s changing. Microsoft is rolling out value tokens. Now, you’ll see a visual cue in the formula bar and in edit mode when a cell contains a rich data type. (Kinda similar to Google Sheets' smart chips. 🧐) No more wondering if the cell is just text or secretly packed with rich data. Less risk of accidental overwriting and breaking the linked connection. Small change for now, with a promise of more to come. 🤖 AI News RoundupA lot's happening in the AI world. Here's your chance to catch up. 🖼️ ChatGPT gets a new image model Dead giveaways of an AI-generated image? Six fingers and wonky text. It might be a thing of the past, as ChatGPT replaces DALL-E 3 with GPT-4o image generation. It promises cleaner, more photorealistic results and actually readable text. 🧠 Copilot gets “deep reasoning” powers Microsoft rolls out two new AI agents, "Researcher" and "Analyst". They're supposed to pull off multi-step research and complex analysis. Available (for now) to early-access M365 Copilot users. 💬 New Copilot interface Meanwhile, Copilot Chat is getting a facelift. Chat history moves to the left panel, making it look more like ChatGPT. You can also switch between the "Quick" and "Think Deeper" modes for faster or more thoughtful replies. You'll find a similar experience in the new Copilot app that's just now rolling out to all Windows 11 users. 🌈 New Gemini Model from Google Not to be outdone, Google announced that it's latest model, Gemini 2.5, is also a "reasoning" model, capable of handling complex prompts. Plus, it's integrating Gemini into Chrome browser and even the Windows taskbar. 🗺️ Did You Know?If you never used rich data types, you can see them in action here: 🌍 The Fastest Way to Research Country Data in Excel #shorts No more googling, no AI needed. Pull the country details in just a few clicks 👏 Power StoriesStill stuck updating reports manually? You’re not alone. Sepp was in the same boat - juggling spreadsheets and chasing outdated stats across his company. He decided enough was enough. And enrolled in Fast Track to Power BI.
This is what leveling up looks like: faster reports, less manual work, and more time for the stuff that matters. Got a success story of your own using your XelPlus skills? Hit reply to share it, and inspire others to power up too 💥 See you next week, Leila Want more?▶️ Subscribe on YouTube 🖇️ Follow us on LinkedIn 🥇 Join 400,000+ students in our courses 📣 Want to sponsor Between the Sheets? Get in touch here. 📨 If you were forwarded this message, you can get the free weekly email here. This newsletter contains affiliate links, which give us a small commission on any purchase made at no cost to you. This helps us run Between the Sheets and bring you updates like this. Thank you for your support! |
Leila Gharani - XelPlus
XelPlus is a leading online education company, providing training courses for Excel, Power BI, Finance, and Google Sheets. XelPlus’ bestselling courses are popular among financial analysts, CFO’s, and business owners. Technology is changing fast. We help our members turn confusion into confidence with every skill learnt.
The good thing about Excel is formulas update automatically. Change an input, the output adjusts. Ok. You know that. But what if you want the output to be a specific number. What should the input be? Let's say, your boss is standing right by your shoulder, staring at your spreadsheet. "We need to reach $2,500 in revenue this month. How many units do we need to sell?" You could keep tweaking the units cell until you get close. Guess, check, guess again. Pleasant enough if you're alone. Not so...
Most people open ChatGPT, drop in an Excel file, and type two words. Analyze this. What comes back looks good. The numbers, the insights, the tidy summary. But how do you actually know if it's right? Last week I put ChatGPT through a proper test. A messy, multi-sheet sales file with codes, lookups, and calculations it had to figure out on its own. Then I verified the results myself with a data model in Excel. There's a specific workflow that makes the difference between trusting AI blindly...
I always build my formulas the same way. I include extra rows below my data, just in case someone adds more next month. And every time, I get a column with zeros. A blank row that should be invisible suddenly shows up as zero in the spilled list. Annoying, but there are ways around it. My go-to was to wrap in a FILTER. Recently it got a lot simpler. One function. Or even better, one character. Add a dot before or after the colon in your range, like A2:.A100, and Excel quietly drops the blank...