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.
The good thing about Excel is formulas update automatically. Change an input, the output adjusts. Ok. You know that. But what if you want the output to be a specific number. What should the input be? Let's say, your boss is standing right by your shoulder, staring at your spreadsheet. "We need to reach $2,500 in revenue this month. How many units do we need to sell?" You could keep tweaking the units cell until you get close. Guess, check, guess again. Pleasant enough if you're alone. Not so...
Most people open ChatGPT, drop in an Excel file, and type two words. Analyze this. What comes back looks good. The numbers, the insights, the tidy summary. But how do you actually know if it's right? Last week I put ChatGPT through a proper test. A messy, multi-sheet sales file with codes, lookups, and calculations it had to figure out on its own. Then I verified the results myself with a data model in Excel. There's a specific workflow that makes the difference between trusting AI blindly...
I always build my formulas the same way. I include extra rows below my data, just in case someone adds more next month. And every time, I get a column with zeros. A blank row that should be invisible suddenly shows up as zero in the spilled list. Annoying, but there are ways around it. My go-to was to wrap in a FILTER. Recently it got a lot simpler. One function. Or even better, one character. Add a dot before or after the colon in your range, like A2:.A100, and Excel quietly drops the blank...