XelPlus is a leading online education company, providing training courses for Excel, Power BI, Finance, and Google Sheets. XelPlusβ bestselling courses are popular among financial analysts, CFOβs, and business owners. Technology is changing fast. We help our members turn confusion into confidence with every skill learnt.
I finally stopped ignoring Copilot Chat
|
I kept closing Copilot Chat the second it popped up. Every time I logged into Microsoft 365, there it was: I just wanted to get to my apps. This new interface felt like one more thing in the way. Well, finally I gave in. Started experimenting to see which prompts could actually reduce friction. For example, I don't look forward to going through unread emails on Monday morning. Especially when I see 47 emails waiting for me. That's friction. I also waste a lot of time looking for files. I don't remember the name. I don't remember where I saved it, but I know it's there somewhere. And search in Explorer is useless for me 90% of the time. So I wanted to see if Copilot could help with this. Turns out, there are more things it can do than I expected. I put together a video walking through all 10 prompts: You can copy all 10 prompts and adjust to your needs:
One thing to note: Microsoft says Copilot Chat is free, but most of these prompts need the paid license to actually work. Here's what's included in free vs. paid. β β π€ Geeky NewsπΈοΈ Excel for the Web gets full Power Query experienceMicrosoft has released something major without a big fanfare. Excel for the Web finally has full Power Query. Yes, that includes data import and transformation. Until now, all you could do on the web was refresh existing queries. Now, you can connect to databases, web sources, and files - as long as they're stored in OneDrive for Business. But what's neat is that you can browse for the file and the correct OneDrive link will be populated for you. You get the modern Get Data interface, as well as a modern Power Query Editor. All the PQ features you know and love are there, just with a fresher design. Except... you can load the data as a table or connection only. No pivot table. And no data model either (Power Pivot is not supported on the web). Don't worry if you don't see the updated interface yet. It's likely rolling out in stages. It's already included in the official support docs, so you can be sure it's coming π₯ Teams finally lets you multi-taskAnother long-overdue update: Teams finally lets you pop out apps into separate windows. Let's be honest: Teams as an all-in-one app never really worked. Because every time you switched between a team, chat, or calendar, you broke your flow. They added pop-out conversations a while back, but that didn't fix it. If you needed to chat with someone new, you still had to leave the channel. Finally, you can open each thing in its own window. Just right-click and "open in new window". Arrange the windows the way you need and switch tasks without closing everything. Works for channel tabs too. Pop out the planner while keeping your project file and chats open. You're the master of your workspace. π OneNote adds proofing language controlOneNote on Windows now lets you set a proofing language for an entire page or as a default. Before this, it just followed your keyboard language at the paragraph level. Useful if you work across multiple languages. Go to Review > Language > Set Proofing Language. Rolling out now to Version 2512 or later. Should hit everyone by end of January. β π Days to minutes. That's what we love to seeKayleigh, a Financial Controller, just told us what Power Query did for her team. Cleaning messy data still tops every survey as the number one Excel struggle. The solution is sitting in the Data tab (now even on the web π) β See you next week, Leila β Want more?βΆοΈ Subscribe on YouTubeβ ποΈ Follow us on LinkedInβ π₯ Join 400,000+ members in our coursesβ π£ Want to sponsor Between the Sheets? Get in touch here. π¨ 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. XelPlusβ bestselling courses are popular among financial analysts, CFOβs, and business owners. Technology is changing fast. We help our members turn confusion into confidence with every skill learnt.
You know that chart exists. You made it. It's in this workbook somewhere. Sheet14? 16? Who named these sheets anyway? Excel has a Navigator for this. Most people still don't know it's there. View > Navigation. It opens a pane on the side with a list of all your tabs. You can easily jump between them. Expand any tab, and you'll see an overview of all the contents in the sheet. All your tables, pivot tables, charts, slicers, and any other objects, like shapes and pictures. Use the search box to...
We all want dashboards that look professional. But a dashboard that looks good and doesn't tell you much? That's more decoration. Your manager sees $2.3M in revenue displayed front and center. Okay. Now what? Is that good or bad? Better than last year? Did we hit target? Without context, that number means nothing. Power BI's new card visual (now generally available) lets you add that context right into your KPIs. Previous period comparisons. Target indicators. Professional design with...
You know the result you want. Excel just wants you to write the perfect formula to get there. And we both know that part can slow us down. Excel recently introduced Formula by Example, which generates a formula from a pattern you provide. This can be helpful. But Power Query has had such a feature for ages. Go to Add Column > Column From Examples. Provide the pattern based on values in other columns, and let it do its magic. And if you have the formula bar enabled (highly recommended), you...