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
|
⚠️ 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.
Recently, I spent an hour testing something. I copied data from a PDF into Excel. You might already know what happens when you do that manually: everything from the row jams into one cell. Complete mess. So I opened Copilot in Excel and asked it to split the data for me. It immediately went to formulas. Simple ones first, then increasingly complex combinations. I tested each one. None of them split the values correctly. Here's what I should have done: skipped the manual copy entirely and used...
Someone just joined your team. They got a quick walkthrough from IT. Maybe from you. Now they're staring at a spreadsheet trying not to look lost. You see, there are a few very simple features that would make the life of an Excel newbie a whole lot easier. I cover 8 of them in this video: #1 was shocking when I discovered it. And #7 saved me days when we had to update all our group reporting files after a rebrand. If you already know your way around Excel, be honest: did you know all 8?...
You've built this cool visual using formulas. Dynamic, clean, exactly what the dashboard needs. For example, a waffle chart Now you want to add it to the main dashboard sheet. But there's a problem. If people start clicking around, they might accidentally delete a formula. Or overwrite a cell. And now your carefully crafted visual is broken. You could protect the sheet. Enter password every time you need to make changes. Or you could get creative. Take a snapshot instead. Linked Picture and...