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.
Let's say you're waiting for colleagues to submit the latest data. You need to check if the files came in. And if the data is complete. So you start opening files one by one. It's tedious. And completely avoidable. When Microsoft released the new IMPORTCSV function, I wasn't ready to throw Power Query out the window. It still handles far more sources and does things this new function simply can't. But it got me thinking. What if you could peek at a CSV without fully loading it? Just enough to...
Excel's chart formatting menu is dangerous. Not because it's bad. Because it gives you too many options. And some of them have no place in a professional report. Take this social media trend: pasting images directly into your chart bars. Looks creative. Gets lots of views on YouTube. But would you put that in front of your manager? In just a few extra clicks, the same data can look like this: Same logos. Matching brand colors. Just used with intention. 👉 Watch: How to build this chart in just...
Excel remembers things you teach it. That's not AI. It's a Custom List. And it's been hiding in Excel Options the whole time. That's how you get to automatically fill down months or days of the week. And you can build your own: team names, department codes, project phases - anything you type over and over. Excel learns the order too. So "Mon, Tue, Wed..." or your custom categories fill in automatically. The list lives on your device, not in the file. Set it up once. Use it in every workbook,...