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.
Excel's outgrown its reputation
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A German Controller Magazine recently said certain time series analysis techniques are "not realistically feasible with Excel." I read that and thought: challenge accepted. So that's what I opened with at the Global Excel Summit in London on Tuesday this past week. Three techniques. Python's data science libraries. Done right inside Excel, live on stage. (And no, the cape on the table isn’t mine. IYKYK) Because Python is in Excel now. The limits people keep assuming are there... a lot of them just aren't anymore. Excel isn't one tool. It's a giant toolbox. And the toolbox keeps growing. That thread ran through a lot of the sessions. Ian Schnoor from the Financial Modeling Institute put it well: don't marry a single club. Every tool has strengths and weaknesses. The goal is finding the right fit for the situation and the person. People get comfortable with what they know, and that's understandable. That's why Python in Excel is a good bridge, since it brings us Python capabilities in the familiar Excel environment that doesn't require any additional setup. And AI helps as well. You can get instant assistance. But Danielle Stein-Fairhurst and Christiano Galvao both made the case that even as AI takes on more, the human in the chain still matters. AI can show you what's possible. But you still need to understand and review the output. That part doesn't go away. And then there was Mark Proctor, who proved Excel can play Taylor Swift songs. Ok, that wasn't the only thing he proved. But also how Excel treats values in the backend and how sometimes 1<>1 in Excel. It was a mix of comedy standup and Excel advanced stuff we thought were too basic. He deservedly won the Best In-Person Session Award. 🎸 So many strong sessions this year. Great engaging speakers. And as always, some of the best conversations happened in the breaks. Thanks to everyone who stopped by to chat! 🤓 Geeky News📊 New Power Query experience in Power BIThe Get Data experience in Power BI is getting a full redesign. If you use Power Query in Excel, you might have already seen it. The new interface adds a cleaner navigation pane, recent sources, and a single screen for connection settings and authentication. Less clicking around, faster to get to the actual work. Dark mode support too, if that matters to you. 🌙 To try it: File > Options and Settings > Options > Preview Features > enable "New Power Query experience." 👥 Together mode in Teams is going awayMicrosoft is retiring Together mode on June 30th. The virtual shared background where everyone sits in the same auditorium or café will be no more. Microsoft is consolidating everything into the modern Gallery view instead. Gallery can already show up to 49 participants at once and adapts automatically based on your device. You can still pin speakers, spotlight presenters, and use branded backgrounds. So not a huge loss in practice. But if your team loved the virtual coffee shop vibe... pour one out. ☕ 📋 Google Forms gets more header image optionsSmall but useful update. You can now pull header images in Google Forms directly from Google Drive or Google Images, or paste a URL. Before, you were limited to pre-set themes, uploads, or Google Photos. 🤔 Did You Know?What I love about the Global Summit, is that no matter how long I use and teach Excel, I always come back with a new trick or ten 😉 And sometimes a reminder about an old technique that's still got it. Ian reminded us about Excel's database functions like DGET and DSUM that are much more flexible than most people realize. They let you look up (and summarize) values based on criteria, without writing a long, complicated formula. Just point to what you want returned. 👏 Excel doesn't have a ceilingSunny is taking Python in Excel for the Real World, and he's already exploring what Python could actually do inside a spreadsheet. Charts Excel can't natively create. Salary distribution across departments. Dynamic visuals that update automatically when new data comes in. That's the thing about Python in Excel. It doesn't replace what you already know. It just removes the ceiling. If you've been curious about what Python could do for your data work, take a look at the course. See you next week, Leila When you're ready, here are some ways we can help: 🎓 Join 400,000+ members in our courses 📺 Get free tutorials on YouTube 👥 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. 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...