Hey there,

No one likes to manually highlight or color-code Excel charts.

As soon as the source data changes, you have to do everything all over again….

So here’s a quick and easy way to conditionally format your bar or columns charts, so the formatting always reflects your source data.

Let’s say you want to highlight the top 3 departments in your company (by sales volume) in a bar chart:

We can’t do it manually - that would fix the color!

Instead, we’ll add a new series for what we want to conditionally format (in this case the ‘top 3’ departments) using this IF formula:

Drag down the formula in your new column, and the sales numbers for the top three departments will appear!

Next, you want to bring this information inside your chart.

Right-click your chart, click Select Data, and under Legend Series click Add to bring up the Edit Series window.

Click on the ‘Top 3’ cell to input the series name, and then for series values, select the rest of the column.

Your data is now in the chart!

Next, it's time to clean up your chart. First directly delete the duplicate values by selecting them and pressing Delete.

Then select one of the chart bars to bring up the Format Data Series side-panel, and change Series Overlap to 100%, to combine your duplicate bars.

Done!

Now you can change each department’s sales number, and your chart will react dynamically in real-time.

Pretty cool 😊

🎬 6 Useful Websites You Need to Use!​

In my latest video I run through 6 useful websites you probably don’t know about.

Each website is free to use (or at least has a free version) and serve different purposes: from keeping you safe online to correcting your grammar. I especially like the AI image enlarger, which lets me enlarge and un-blur low-res images.

​Jotti is also very good. It's an anti-malware website that runs your files through several major scanners like Bitdefender or Kaspersky, delivering a comprehensive report. This is incredibly useful, as no single anti-malware can detect 100% of malicious files.

🤓 Geeky News

📊 Excel - Formula Argument Assistance in Excel for the Web Excel will now make suggestions and offer guidance as you write your formulas, making the experience much more user-friendly! Google Sheets has had a similar feature for a while. But the big news is that it’s coming to Excel for Desktop 😊 - we just don’t know when.

📈Power BI - On-Object Creation and Formatting of Visuals
Creating and formatting visuals in Power BI just got simpler! You can now do both "on object”. In other words, you can format directly through the visual, instead of using a separate input pane. Just double-click or right-click on the visual to enter ‘format mode’. This aligns with Microsoft’s new strategy to make Power BI more ‘Office-like’, and makes Power BI behave more like Excel.

📝 Word - Paste Text Only Shortcut​
You can now copy / paste text from a website into Word without having to manually change the source formatting. Simply use the Paste Text Only shortcut: Ctrl + Shift + V. This also works in the Office 365 version of Excel. It’s worth noting that Ctrl + Shift + V used to be the shortcut for Format Painter - it’s just been reprogrammed.

🤖 Open AI - GPT-4 Announcement​

GPT-4 has been released, and much earlier than expected! OpenAI say it’s significantly more powerful than GPT-3.5 (the system used for ChatGPT). GPT-4 scores 90% in the Law Bar Exam, far better than ChatGPT’s 10%… Things are speeding up in the AI world.

If you’re using the new Bing, you’re already familiar with GPT-4. The latest version of Microsoft Edge runs on OpenAI’s GPT-4.

💚 My Favorite Things

🎙️ Podcast - Cal Newport on Lifestyle Design and Slow Productivity Cal’s the author of some classic productivity books, including Deep Work and So Good They Can’t Ignore You. I love his definition of ‘slow productivity’:

1. Do fewer things
2. Work at a natural pace
3. Obsess over quality.

Approach your work with these principles in mind, and every project will be meaningful and satisfying.

🚀 Power Stories

Nathan left this amazing comment on one of my videos. Thank you Nathan, and congratulations on the promotion! 💚

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

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