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.
Excel finally stopped hiding this feature
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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 to type the references instead of selecting the range, which makes your neat table difficult to work with. There's always been a better way to do this: Center Across Selection. Same look, nothing actually merged. But it was buried in Format Cells > Alignment, so most people either never found it or couldn't be bothered to click that far. Not anymore. It's finally coming to the ribbon. ๐ Here's where it landedโ Have some patience if you don't see it yet. It's rolling out to Insiders first, but it's coming ๐ฅณ ๐ค Geeky News๐ฌ Text predictions are now off by default in Word and OutlookโMicrosoft flipped predictive-text suggestions from on-by-default to opt-in, across Word and classic Outlook on Windows, Mac, web, and mobile. At first I found them distracting. Who does Outlook think it is, assuming it can read my mind. But I got used to them. Might have to turn them back on. The setting is available in Options, if it turns out you miss them. ๐ก Custom fonts finally made it to Google Sheets chartsYou can now pull from the full Google Fonts library for chart titles, axis labels, legends, and data labels. Fonts also survive the round trip between Excel and Sheets now instead of quietly reverting to a fallback font. If you've ever rebuilt a chart because the font came back as Arial for no reason, this one's for you. ๐บ Turn a report into a video with Google VidsFeed it a Doc, PDF, or Word file, and Google Vids generates a short AI-narrated video with visuals, script, and all. Whether that beats just reading the summary probably depends on how long the report is. ๐ Available with Business and Plus accounts. ๐ Before the AI boomChin Wan, a senior service engineer, just earned his Power Query badge from Master Excel Power Query and posted this on LinkedIn: One line stood out to me: he's glad he learned this before the AI boom hit. I get that. The other day I asked Copilot Chat for an Excel formula. It only took a second or two to give me what I wanted. There was just one problem: it was a Google Sheets formula. It didn't work in Excel. Because I knew that, I spotted the problem straight away. If I hadn't, I could've easily spent the next hour trying to figure out why this supposedly correct formula refused to work. When you understand the tool, AI can make you much faster. When you don't, you have no way of knowing whether it's giving you a clever shortcut... or sending you down a completely pointless rabbit hole. So yes, I'm with Chin Wan on this one. Learn how the thing works first. Then let AI make you faster. See you next week, Leila P.S. In case youโre wondering what Copilot gave me... it was this ๐ REGEXMATCH is a Google Sheets function. The Excel equivalent is REGEXTEST. So close... and yet completely useless in Excel. ๐ When you're ready, here are some ways we can help: ๐ Join 500,000+ members in our coursesโ ๐บ Get free tutorials on YouTubeโ ๐ฅ Train your whole team with our courses. Team pricing and progress tracking - reply for details. This newsletter contains affiliate links, which give us a small commission at no cost to you. 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.
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...
Budget versus actual is one of those reports that follows you around if you're in Controlling, FP&A or creating any type of management report for your company. I built versions of it for years. The numbers were never the difficult part. Putting it together so it actually communicated something was the tricky bit. Management always wants to see things from different angles, so it had to work by month and by region. How could I fit it all on one page? Actuals, plan, previous year, variances,...
When I worked in finance, the reports I had to build almost always needed data from different tables. Sales figures sitting in one. Product details in another. And the report needed both. So I did what most people still do. I used VLOOKUP to pull everything into the sales table until it turned into one mega giant table. Ok, these days you'd reach for XLOOKUP, but it's still the same move. It worked, but it was slower and more work than it needed to be. I had no clue there was a cleaner way. I...