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.
Important cells - do not touch!
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You've prepared a report template and sent it out to your colleagues to input data. It comes back and you realize: they messed up your formulas. Argh! Not again! 🤦♀️ If only you had used protection... Today in Between the Sheets:
🔐 Protect your work in ExcelTired of fixing broken formulas? Tracking down who messed up the numbers this time? Or worse - deleted an important column? It’s frustrating. But you can stop the chaos before it starts. Excel has built-in protection features to help. You'll find them on the Review tab. 🔒 When you Protect Sheet with a password, no one can edit the cells. Perhaps you can hide the password inside detailed instructions. That way only those who have actually read them can make changes 😉 Or restrict them only to certain areas. 👉 For a step-by-step guide, check out our blog post. 🔏 Cool tip: For multiple access levels, use Allow Edit Ranges. This allows you to create different passwords for different people, in the areas they're responsible for. For example, only HR can populate the bonus information. And only the Manager can approve it. For anyone else, it stays locked. Set up the ranges and the passwords, then Protect Sheet. 🔒 Want to keep the structure intact as well? Protect Workbook stops users from adding, deleting or renaming sheets. Just don't lose track of your passwords. While possible to unlock without one, it is a bit of a hassle. 🤓 Geeky News👨✈️ Disable the Copilot icon in Excel and WordIf you weren't a fan of the floating Copilot icon that hid the contents of the cells, you can now disable it permanently. Kinda. As promised, Microsoft has added Copilot to Excel Options (File > Options > Copilot). Currently, it only has the checkbox to "Show Copilot icon only for highly relevant suggestions". When you check it, it will hide the icon from showing up all the time. It might still pop up when it deems some data relevant to its suggestions. You can still access Copilot suggestions from the right-click menu or open the Copilot pane using the button on the Home tab. You also get Options for working with Copilot in Word. There, you can automatically collapse Copilot summary. Perhaps in time, there will be more Copilot settings we can control via the Options menu. 👋 Wave goodbye to these Microsoft productsMicrosoft is doing some spring cleaning and discontinues apps that have fallen out of popularity. By May 2025, it's shutting down Skype. Once synonymous with online video calls, it's been mostly replaced by Zoom and Teams. Users can transition to Microsoft Teams with their Skype contacts, call logs and message history. Also in May 2025, Microsoft's ending the support for the Remote Desktop app. It's going to be replaced by the Windows App used to connect to virtual desktops. Note that this doesn't affect (for now) the Remote Desktop Connection utility included in Windows OS and used to connect to remote devices on local networks. Publisher is going away in October 2026. It was part of the Office suite, useful for designing covers, brochures, and flyers. Microsoft recommends converting your existing .pub files to .pdf or Word. Will you miss any of the apps going away? ❤️ A YouTube Event Like No OtherI just got back from a YouTube creators conference in Zurich - and it wasn’t what I expected. Some events feel transactional. Some feel like a show. But this was different. There’s a reason I’ve been on YouTube this long. And after this event, I’m even more certain why. I shared the experience (and some behind-the-scenes surprises) on LinkedIn. Read it here. 👏 Power StoriesCongratulations to David for completing Unlock Excel VBA & Excel Macros course! 🥳🙌 Learning through problem-solving is one of the best methods to fully grasp and understand the concepts. It makes it easier to apply the learning to any scenario. Good luck with any automation challenges ahead! Keep up the persistent attitude 🦾 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 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.
You've built this cool visual using formulas. Dynamic, clean, exactly what the dashboard needs. For example, a waffle chart Now you want to add it to the main dashboard sheet. But there's a problem. If people start clicking around, they might accidentally delete a formula. Or overwrite a cell. And now your carefully crafted visual is broken. You could protect the sheet. Enter password every time you need to make changes. Or you could get creative. Take a snapshot instead. Linked Picture and...
Someone asked me recently about automation tricks in Excel. Fair question. Everyone's talking about AI agents right now. Microsoft's pushing them hard, every tech company's got one. But here's what they don't mention in the demos: AI agents cost extra. They work maybe half the time. You're basically hoping they get it right. Meanwhile, you already have a tool that does exactly what you tell it to. Every single time. Power Automate. You've probably got access already (comes with most Microsoft...
AI is everywhere. And I mean everywhere. Your email tool has it. Your spreadsheet has it. Even your coffee maker is probably marketing itself as "AI-powered" these days. The pitch is always the same: "This will do your work for you." "Build fully functional apps without knowing how to code." "10x your productivity." And yeah, sometimes AI actually delivers. It's genuinely impressive when it does. But here's what I've noticed: when it works, the work doesn't disappear. It just changes. You go...