Hey there,

After months of planning, the new XelPlus website is now live!

And we used Google Sheets - not Excel - to manage the project and track open issues! 😮

So, why Google Sheets?

Three reasons:

1. 🖼️ Easier Images ​
You can easily insert images “inside” a cell in Google Sheets. This let us quickly share visuals with our web developers.
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Excel lets you insert an image into a cell using the image’s URL. But you can’t just drag and drop a local image inside a cell like you can in Sheets. Sure - there are workarounds, but they’re still not as easy.

2. ✅ Better Task Tracking
​The colored pill-shaped, drop-down lists in Sheets make it easy to see who needs to work on what at a glance. This is super useful for project management.
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Excel doesn’t have a neat equivalent yet - you’d have to activate conditional formatting but that doesn’t look as good.

3. 🤝 Team Compatibility
​We also used Sheets because our web developers were more familiar with Google products. Sometimes you need to be flexible!

My Main Takeaway: It pays to know different tools and apps, so you can pick the one that’s best suited for the job.

📚 Shortform​

Want to read more books? In that case, I highly recommend Shortform! 👇

​Shortform offers high-quality guides to the best non-fiction books in the world.

Each guide includes a concise 1-page summary of the key ideas, written in a straightforward, no-nonsense style. You also get a detailed chapter-by-chapter breakdown, with exercises at the end of each chapter to help you retain the information.

This unique approach helps you grasp the key concepts of a 15-hour book in just 2 hours. It’s like having a knowledgeable friend giving you the inside scoop! Shortform have 1000s of titles in their library that cover dozens of topics, including careers advice, finance, and technology. And they’re always adding more.

Ready to give it a try? Sign up for a free trial at http://shortform.com/leila, and get $50 off the annual subscription - that’s equivalent to 3 free months!

Thank you to Shortform for sponsoring today’s newsletter. 😊

🎬 Bing Discover in Edge

​In this video I show you how to use AI directly in Microsoft Edge. Use Bing Discover to compose text, suggest recipes, summarize web pages, and rephrase your sentences. You can ask follow up questions, and even generate images.

I haven’t used the Chat functionality that much. The one I've used A LOT these past days is Compose. Here’s an example of Bing in Compose mode, expanding on a short sentence I wrote:

🤓 Geeky News

🧑‍🤝‍🧑 Microsoft Teams: Introducing the New Teams
Microsoft Teams has been rebuilt from the ground up, promising to be 2x faster while using 50% less memory and 70% less disk space. I’ve tested it out, and there’s a noticeable improvement. 🥳

It’s currently in public preview: you’ll see a “Try the new Teams” toggle should appear in your top-left corner.

Some apps & features aren’t available yet in the new Teams experience. But you can switch between the Old and New versions using this toggle:

👹 Teams - Creepy Avatars?​
Microsoft have ‘improved’ the Teams avatars by making them a bit more realistic. But one of my team thinks they just look creepy. What do you think??

Avatars are meant to be a middle ground between switching your camera on / off. Incidentally, I came across an interesting graph this week that compares the number of Slack vs Teams users:

Trung Phan @TrungTPhan Microsoft Teams now has 270m users. Slack has 20m users. Wild chart. pic.twitter.com/AH6ZnEfDxO March 29th 2023 660 Retweets 8,967 Likes

➰ Microsoft Loop - Now Available to the Public
Microsoft Loop is a new Notion-like app that’s great for collaborating on ideas and projects. I call it “app without borders”. Satya Nadella has a better way of describing it (obviously) - I might be paraphrasing here but he says something along the lines of: “Loop meets the people where they are”. We’re testing Loop internally at XelPlus, and my initial impression is that it’s a bit buggy. But once we have more insights, I’ll make a video.

💚 My Favorite Things

🌍 PLAN International - A Special Thank You
Our members made this possible – we’ve just partnered with a new charity organization - PLAN International. Through them, we get to together sponsor 30 girls in developing countries. We’ll help fund and organize local projects in those girls’ communities giving them and their families a chance to break the cycle of poverty. 😊

I’ve worked with a lot of charities, but I particularly love how transparent Plan International are. Now every month we get to share a portion of our course sales with these children. If you’ve purchased a course, THANK YOU! You’ve made this possible.

🏖️ Time Off ​
I’m taking time off next week to travel and unwind, so I'll skip next week's issue and return on the 16th of April. Remember to make time for self-care and de-stressing!

🚀 Power Stories

The XelPlus VBA course was one of the most difficult courses for me to put together. Not only because it’s my longest course, but also because it took months to figure out how to make it challenging and easy to digest.

Anyway, I was going through our review and feedback form, and this comment from Philip made my day:

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 soon,

Leila

Want more?

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