profile

Leila Gharani - XelPlus

Best New Excel Features of 2023 ⭐

Published 10 months ago • 3 min read

3 things we’re covering today:

  • Excel’s brand-new look
  • I’m hosting an Excel gameshow on ESPN8!
  • How to share sections of your Excel workbook

🎬 Best New Excel Features EVERYONE Needs

video preview

My latest video covers all of the best new features in Microsoft Excel. These could make a huge difference to your workflow!

  1. Easy Search - Instead of searching through the traditional menus to find a specific feature or command in Excel, you can now use the right-click search function. Just right-click anywhere on a cell, a sheet tab, or the ribbon.
  2. Navigation Pane - The Navigation pane gives you an overview of all the sheets in your workbook and their content (including hidden sheets), letting you easily manage large spreadsheets.
  3. New Keyboard Shortcuts - Use shortcuts like Alt+F12 to quickly access the Power Query Editor window, or Ctrl+C, Ctrl+Shift+V to copy and paste cells as values.
  4. Automate Tab - Use the Automate tab in Excel to create and run Office Scripts for your repetitive tasks, now on desktop as well as Excel for the Web.
  5. Value Preview Tooltip - Sometimes, understanding why a formula is returning a specific result can be challenging. The Value Preview Tooltip gives you a quick preview of the result of a formula directly from the formula bar. When you click on any part of a formula within the formula bar, a small tooltip-like window pops up, showing you the result of that specific part of the formula.
  6. Dynamic Arrays in Power Query - You can now use dynamic array functions as source data for Power Query, letting you create dynamic, updatable results based on your Excel sheets.
  7. Dynamic Arrays as Charts Source - Likewise, you can use dynamic array functions as sources for your charts. This lets them automatically expand or shrink based on results.

If you’re not already using these features, give them a try!

There’s more in-depth information in my video.

🤖 Bright Data - Everything You Need to Scrape Web Data at Scale

Scraping public web data is a challenge, and without the right tools scraping data at scale is almost impossible.

That’s why I’m introducing you to the world's leading web data platform Bright Data, who have developed the revolutionary Scraping Browser!

It manages all website unlocking operations under the hood, and automatically adjusts to handle IP blocks, CAPTCHA solving, fingerprints and more. You can run hundreds of Scraping Browsers asynchronously so you can get the data you need in minutes!

Thank you to Bright Data for sponsoring this issue. 🙏

🤓 Geeky News

👩‍🎨 Office has a new default theme (Currently Insiders)

Excel (and the rest of the Office suite) now has a new theme. Here are some of the biggest changes:

  • The default font is now Aptos instead of Calibri. Aptos used to be known as Bierstadt. But that translates from German to “Beer City”, so for obvious reasons Microsoft had to adjust the name!
  • New adjustable color palettes (Beta Insiders Channel only):
  • There are also new default text styles for Word and Outlook emails:

📊 Excel - Share a section of your Excel file (Desktop Current Channel & Excel Web)

You can now link directly to a section of your workbook, instead of sharing the whole thing. This is often safer and more efficient.

Here’s how to do it in Excel for Desktop:

  1. Open your Excel file
  2. Select a range
  3. Right mouse click and select “link to this range”
  4. Copy the link and share it.

📱Microsoft 365 - Insert photos from Android phone into Word, Excel, and PowerPoint for Windows files

You can now transfer images to a Word, Excel, or PowerPoint file from your Android phone using a wireless connection! No more emailing or multiple steps.

But there are two requirements:

  • You must have a Microsoft Enterprise account
  • Your Android device must be nearby

💚 News Worthy

🎰 I’m Hosting an Excel Gameshow on ESPN8

Something very exciting is coming your way…

At 7 AM (ET), August 4, Excel Esports takes the Spotlight on "ESPN8: The Ocho"!

The show is an adrenaline-pumping Excel Esports Elimination Battle: 8 Excel enthusiasts will be competing in a fierce 30-minute battle, but every 5 minutes one of them will be eliminated.

You can watch the teaser trailer here. The show is hosted by myself and my wonderful MVP friends Bill Jelen (aka MrExcel) and Oz du Soleil!

🚀 Power Stories

Thank you to Maria for this lovely review of my Master New Excel Functions in Office 365 course. She’s right, there are a lot of new functions to keep track of, but they’re very powerful once mastered!

Happy to be your data-manipulating guru Maria 💚

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 me on LinkedIn

🥇 Join 400,000+ students in our courses

📣 Want to sponsor XelPlus Weekly? Get in touch 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 XelPlus Weekly and bring you updates like this. Thank you for your support!

Leila Gharani - XelPlus

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. 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.

Read more from Leila Gharani - XelPlus

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. 🎬 Master VLOOKUP for effortless reporting In my...

5 days ago • 4 min read

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...

12 days ago • 4 min read

We’re almost done with our New Excel Business Charts Course and it’s 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...

about 1 month ago • 4 min read
Share this post