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.
Stop wasting time on trial and error
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⚠️ Ever seen Excel flash a circular reference error? One second your formula looks fine, the next Excel warns you it’s referring back to itself. That’s the nightmare of a circular reference. Excel stuck in an endless loop. To make matters worse, Excel isn't kind enough to point you to the source of the problem. 👉 In this blog, I’ll show you how to track down those sneaky errors and fix them fast. Sometimes though, you might want to use circular references. For example, to create automatic timestamps. But if you do, proceed with caution. They can mess up your important calculations. 💚 Excel turns 40!Excel's hitting 40 this Tuesday September 30th! Four decades of making our work lives easier (and occasionally driving us nuts). To mark the occasion, Microsoft team's doing a Reddit AMA. Head over to r/excel on Sep 30, 10 AM Pacific, if you've got questions about where it's heading next. 🤓 Geeky News🍎 Mac gets clipboard historyFinally! With macOS 26 “Tahoe,” Mac users can now paste from clipboard history. Windows has had Win + V for ages. Now Mac joins in with Cmd + Space + 4. Turn it on first, then copy away. With multiple items copied, paste them where you need - no more back-and-forth. 🌈 Google Search lands on WindowsGoogle is launching an app for Windows. Use the shortcut Alt + Space to open a discrete search bar wherever you are. It can search through your computer files and apps, Google Drive, and the web. No app switching or flow interruption. It also supports AI Mode (like basically everything these days). Currently just an experiment from Search Labs, available to US users with a personal Google account. 🤔 There's a lot of competition for the Alt + Space shortcut, though. It's also used to launch the Copilot app, as well as PowerToys Run, both of which serve a similar purpose. You'll have to choose your preferred solution and disable or change the shortcuts for the rest. 🎨 Paint grows upRemember when Paint was just for simple doodles? Not anymore. It now supports projects - you can save editable .paint files and come back later, instead of flattening everything to .jpg or .png. Rolling out to Insiders, alongside updates to Snipping Tool and Notepad. 👏 Less stress, more progressTie used to waste hours debugging Python code through trial and error. Then he learned the fundamentals properly. So yeah. Sometimes you've got to slow down to speed up. 👉 What's your biggest time-waster right now? Usually it's the thing you're trying to hack your way through. Have a great week and see you next Sunday, 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...