Hey there,

Do you often waste precious minutes hunting for things in the Excel ribbon?
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If this happens enough times, it can slow down your workflow a lot! Luckily, Microsoft has just introduced a new ‘personal Toolbar’ that solve the problem.

When this message pops up in Excel, select Create My Toolbar 👇

The Excel features you use most will pop up in a personalized toolbar that replaces your standard Ribbon, including some drop-downs for flexibility

If you don’t like the experience, go to the Layout tab and select Classic to get the default Ribbon back:

Prefer to directly edit the Ribbon? You can also create your own custom tab in any version of Excel!

Right click anywhere on the ribbon, and select Customize. This pulls up a customization menu where you can name your tab, and add necessary features:

Here’s the end result! No more digging to find your favorite buttons.

To see the whole process for both methods, check out my 60-second walkthrough.

💸 A Banksy got everyday investors 32% returns?​

This might sound too good to be true, but it really happened. And thousands of investors are benefiting, thanks to the fine-art investing platform Masterworks.

This isn’t cherry-picking either. Masterworks has built a track record of 11 exits, the last 3 realizing +13.9%, +17.8%, and +21.5% net returns even while financial markets plummeted.

But art? Really? Here are the numbers. Contemporary art prices:

• outpaced the S&P 500 by 131% over the last 26 years
• have the lowest correlation to equities of any asset class
• remained stable through the dot-com bubble and ’08 crisis

Got your attention yet? XelPlus readers can skip their waitlist with this exclusive link.​

Thank you to Masterworks for sponsoring this issue. 😊

🎬 How to Not Get Promoted​

This is my Ultimate Guide to sabotaging your career growth and losing motivation at work… I find these ‘reverse’ type of video more relatable sometimes. We’ve all made at least one of these mistakes at some point!

Including me I’m afraid 🤦‍♀️

🤓 Geeky News

🤖 Edge & Bing - An AI-Powered “Copilot for the Web”
​This appeared on my Edge version on Thursday, but should now be available to all Edge users! There are three AI tab options so far, and they all seem very powerful.

1. Chat lets you ask questions about anything you like:

2. Compose gives you AI writing assistance (tone, spelling, rewriting):

3. And Insights summarizes the main content of a page in a Q&A-style format:

✈️ Microsoft 365 - New AI Copilot Feature ​
Microsoft is moving fast with AI! The new Microsoft 365 Copilot feature is only available to select customers right now.
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But it effectively gives you an AI assistant in Excel, Word, Teams, PowerPoint, and Outlook. You can ask it questions, and even give specific directions like ‘Summarize the emails I missed while I was out last week’. I’m curious to see how people use Office in the future. 👀

✋Teams - Automatic Lowering of Raised Hand
To reduce the number of ‘stale’ raised hands in meetings, you’ll now get a prompt to lower your hand after speaking. If you don’t take any action on the suggestion notification, Teams will automatically lower the hand for you. No more reminding people to lower their hands!

📐 Google Sheets - 11 New Functions Added​
Google has added 11 new functions to Google Sheets, including LET, VSTACK/HSTACK, WRAPROWS/WRAPCOLS, CHOOSEROWS/CHOOSECOLS, TOROW/TOCOL. Microsoft have already added these to Excel. 😆

But Sheets also has two unique new functions:

💚 My Favorite Things

👨‍💻 A Big Redesign - XelPlus Website
I built the current XelPlus website in WordPress all by myself back in 2015–2016. So it’s time for a change. We’ve been rebuilding from scratch, making the site easier to navigate and giving tutorials a nicer look. It should go live at the end of March!

😇 Bonus Tip - How to Unzip Files
A student in our course struggled with connecting to source files, because he couldn’t unzip the folder. If you’ve ever wondered how to do this, here’s a useful guide from The Verge with everything you ever wanted to know about unzipping.

🚀 Power Stories

Michael Da Silva had this to say about our Fast Track to Power BI course. Thank you for the excellent feedback Michael! 😊

Got a success story about using your XelPlus skills? I’d love to hear it! Hit reply to share the details, and inspire other students 😇

See you next week,

Leila

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