XelPlus is a leading online education company, providing training courses for Excel, Power BI, Finance, and Google Sheets. XelPlusโ bestselling courses are popular among financial analysts, CFOโs, and business owners. Technology is changing fast. We help our members turn confusion into confidence with every skill learnt.
Copilot's attempt at a dashboard ๐คจ
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In my first Finance job, I had to prepare summary reports from one dataset and upload them to another system. I created a pivot table from the data. Pivot tables are perfect for quickly summarizing data. I knew that. ๐ช My pivot table looked similar to this. ๐ It had the exact info I needed to upload. But the system threw errors. It wouldn't accept my upload. I had to separate out the headers and fill in the blanks. Well... I copied and pasted my pivot table on another sheet and manually started re-arranging. Hours later, I was happily done (it was a lot of data and I was sloooow). The next day, I was told I had to prepare this every month. You can imagine my face expression. It wasn't pretty. I started going nuts with formulas. I think I even wrote VBA code for some bits. Had I known that with just 2 clicks in the menu, I could have achieved this: And gotten exactly what I needed. I discovered it a few months later. Better late than never, right? All I had to do was go to the Design tab, change the Layout to Tabular and Repeat All Item Labels. Often difficult problems have simple solutions. And often, that solution is a pivot table. Or a feature of a pivot table. That's why I'm so excited for our upcoming Pivot Table Essentials course. In one of the modules that I recorded last week, we design an interactive dashboard from scratch. I had an idea about what I wanted to create, but I decided to ask Copilot to see if it had a better idea. ๐ค Copilot designs a dashboard...So, I asked Copilot to design an HR dashboard. I provided the sample data and asked for a "minimalistic, practical and meaningful HR dashboard design." This is what it came up with: Can you name all the things that are wrong with this design? Let me start:
No worries. I didn't take Copilot's advice. (In the new course, though, I will show you what Copilot in Excel is currently capable of.) ๐ค Geeky Newsโฐ Upload files to LoopMicrosoft's collaboration platform Loop now supports file upload. You can collect files related to the project in the project's workspace. Click on + Create New > Upload a file. Select the file or files and click Open to start uploading. You can upload Word, PowerPoint, Excel and PDF files under 250 GB each. It's currently rolling out to Loop Preview. It's part of the new Loop interface, which makes it easier to create new Loop elements (workspaces, pages, links) and navigate between them. ๐งฐ PowerToys Workspaces to jumpstart your workFrom one Workspace to another - the new utility in PowerToys. PowerToys is a suite of productivity tools for Windows. Check out my video to see how to install it and what else it offers. It continues to add new tools to the toolbox. The latest version (0.84) introduces Workspaces. With Workspaces, you can launch multiple apps at the same time, in your preferred layout and configuration. First, enable Workspaces in PowerToys settings. Then, launch the Workspaces editor. Set up all the programs you use for a specific task or project just the way you like them. Click Create Workspace. PowerToys will scan your current desktop layout and map all open apps into one Workspace. Give it a name and create a desktop shortcut. You can set up multiple Workspaces for different tasks. I expect this will come in handy when I'm recording screencasts ๐ ๐ Google teams up with Internet ArchiveIf your job involves any type of research, hopefully you know and use the great tool that is the Wayback Machine. It's a time machine for the Internet. It lets you access historical versions of websites. This helps you estimate when certain information was added or removed. You can access websites that are now defunct. Good news! Internet Archive, the non-profit behind the Wayback Machine, has partnered with Google to include the archived web pages in search results. Click on the three dots next to the link, go to "More about this page" and then "See previous versions on Internet Archive's Wayback Machine". It' a really valuable resource. And now it's more accessible as well. ๐ Power StoriesLast week, I went through our course feedback and success stories from students. These reviews made me proud of what our students achieved. I have huge datasets increasingly monthly. I need to be able to analyze the data in all kinds of ways, and I was aware that I simply didnโt know enough about Excel to do what I wanted, easily and dynamically. I was overwhelmed with the tasksโฆ I had fabulous lightbulb moments where I learnt pivot tables from your training. It helped me see exactly what I need to use going forward. I have gained clarity. - Pat I used to write lots of if statements, macro, having difficulty joining multiple spreadsheets with columns & row into a single analysis then run manual report. Now I can automate the whole process and produce active reports with Pivot Table and Pivot Charts. This course extends my usage habit and function about Excel. Saved me hours of time and found many new possibilities to present the data. - John Our Pivot table Essentials - Basics to Mastery course is planned to go live on Tuesday. Keep an eye out for the announcement email. Best, Leila Want more?โถ๏ธ Subscribe on YouTubeโ ๐๏ธ Follow us on LinkedInโ ๐ฅ Join 400,000+ students in our coursesโ ๐ฃ Want to sponsor Between the Sheets? Get in touch here. ๐จ 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. XelPlusโ bestselling courses are popular among financial analysts, CFOโs, and business owners. Technology is changing fast. We help our members turn confusion into confidence with every skill learnt.
You've got a long list like this that needs to go into separate columns. Copy-paste? Nope. From now on copy-paste is officially banned for this type of work ๐ซ There's a single function that does the whole thing in seconds. ๐ Here's how it works Imagine copy-pasting 500 contacts! My wrist cramps up even thinking about it. ๐ค Geeky News Copilot in Outlook now handles your calendar Microsoft just made Copilot in Outlook agentic. Meaning it doesn't wait for you to ask. It sorts through your inbox,...
Quick question. How many working days are left until your project deadline? Not calendar days. Working days. No weekends and no public holidays. And no that-week-everyone-takes-off-in-August. Most people subtract two dates and call it done. Then wonder why the timeline is slightly off. Excel has a function built for exactly this. Custom weekends, holidays, even non-standard working schedules. ๐ Watch how it works and grab the practice file ๐ ๐จ๏ธ Someone asked in the comments: what if you need...
For years, I did something I'm a little embarrassed to admit now. Every time I needed to present pivot table data, I'd copy it out. Paste it as values into a separate sheet. Then format it manually. My pivot table stayed hidden in the background like a rough draft nobody was allowed to see. Why did I do this? Pivot table default styles are just ugly. Nothing to impress management with. It never occurred to me that the pivot table itself could look like this: Yes. That's a pivot table. Fully...