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.
Clean visuals and clean data
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"Just show me the numbers." That’s what your manager says after you’ve spent hours perfecting your visual. In today's Between the Sheets, we’re exploring:
Presenting data in tablesExcel tables for analysis and tables for presentation are two different things. Which table is easier to interpret at a glance? How to achieve this clean design?
When a Table Needs More Than Just NumbersIf you're comparing actuals to previous year, the key insight is the difference between them. A table helps, but the real story pops when you visualize the change. That’s where charts inside tables make all the difference. The data bars feature in Conditional Formatting can do that in no time. Learn more here. Charts for DecisionsSome managers love digging into the details, but most just want to see the big picture - fast. And that’s where charts do the heavy lifting. A good chart makes decisions easier. It shows trends, highlights changes, and gets straight to the point. No squinting at rows of numbers required. And since most of us present in PowerPoint, building those charts needs to be fast and frustration-free, not a manual time-suck. That’s where our sponsor comes in. I've known their tool for years. It's been a go-to for many companies I worked with and I've seen firsthand how much time it saves. So if you want to go from data to presentation-ready charts in seconds, not hours - you'll love this tool. 🤓 Geeky News🧹 Clean Data in ExcelPreviously introduced in Excel for the Web, a new feature has made its way to Excel Desktop (currently Insiders Beta). You'll find it on the Data tab, next to Text to Columns. It's called Clean Data. It's able to spot and correct issues with your data, like extra spaces, inconsistent text spelling (e.g., XelPlus and Xelplus), and numbers formatted as text. Unfortunately, it doesn't work on dates formatted as text. Probably because of the difficulty of interpreting months and days in various regions. But as all AI features, it comes with a disclaimer that "AI-generated suggestions may be incorrect". It's speedy and convenient but doesn't free you (the Human*) from ensuring its accuracy. (*We assume 😉 but no worries - we won't make you click on all traffic lights 😉) ✈️ Copilot app for Windows & MacMicrosoft releases yet another version of the Copilot app for Windows. This one - currently rolling out to Windows Insiders - shows some potential. It's native to Windows and offers better performance than previous web-based iterations. This version of the AI chatbot is system-aware, so it can provide specific technical advice that works with your operating system. For now, there's no word whether it will be able to affect system settings for you. Microsoft has also released Copilot for Mac. It's a stable version, available via the App Store. It includes Think Deeper, the "advanced reasoning" model that's better at processing the context of your prompts. Something that the Windows app doesn't have it, at least not yet, but you can use it through the browser. 📝 AI-powered Rewrite in NotepadSince all the Office apps are getting AI, the humble Notepad didn't want to be outdone. It now comes with Rewrite, which allows you to change the tone and modify the length of your text. With "custom rewrite", you can change the tone to more formal, inspirational, or persuasive. Or adapt the format, choosing between Marketing, Business, Academic, and even poetry. It requires a Microsoft 365 Personal or Family subscription with Copilot credits to work, though. 👏 Power StoriesSometimes, like Marcus reminds us, we need to step out of our usual patterns and explore the possibilities. Excel charts (and tables) are much more versatile and compelling than most realize. Congrats to Marcus on completing the Business Charts in Excel course and stepping up his charts game! This course has inspired me to step out of the usual practices and fully explore the potential of Excel charts to convey clear and convincing messages. From this course, I discovered the aesthetic beauty and the compelling nature that Excel charts can achieve - sometimes it's just some tweaks (but knowing where to make them is what I learned), and sometimes it could be an entire new experience in creating stunning charts from raw data. - Marcus Lam
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.
When I worked in finance, the reports I had to build almost always came from more than one sheet. A lot of copy-pasting. These days one formula can do that for you. It's called VSTACK. It stacks your sheets into one list. It stays live, works in Excel Online, and anyone who opens the file knows exactly what's happening. Most people who use VSTACK, use it to glue two ranges together, and think that's it. But that's barely scratching the surface. I put together my top 6 VSTACK tips in this new...
The most common way people mess up their own spreadsheets is a button sitting right there on the Home tab. Merge & Center. It's one of the first buttons anyone learns in Excel, and it does exactly what it says: centers a title, makes a header look tidy. The trouble starts the moment someone uses it inside the data instead of just the header row. Try to sort... yep, it doesn't work. Try to sum a column with a merged cell sitting in the middle of it. Column E, for example: Exactly. You'd have...
What do you do when your data goes wide? Picture a sales table with one row per rep, but then Sales_Jan, Units_Jan, Sales_Feb, Units_Feb, and so on, all the way to December. It just keeps growing wider with every month you add. Try to filter by month, or build a pivot table around it, and you're stuck. Month isn't a value in this table. It's baked into the column headers. You need a way to turn the wide into long so that it's ready for analysis. And there's a Python function that does exactly...