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.
How many working days until your deadline?
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Quick question. How many working days are left until your project deadline? Not calendar days. Working days. No weekends and no public holidays. And no that-week-everyone-takes-off-in-August. Most people subtract two dates and call it done. Then wonder why the timeline is slightly off. Excel has a function built for exactly this. Custom weekends, holidays, even non-standard working schedules. ๐ Watch how it worksโ โand grab the practice file ๐ ๐จ๏ธ Someone asked in the comments: what if you need to sum hours instead of days? That's where you need to know how Excel stores time. 1 day is stored as 1. So 1 hour is 1/24. When you subtract a start time from an end time, you get a decimal. Multiply by 24 to convert it to hours. =(End - Start) * 24 Sum the column and you have total hours worked for the week. ๐ค Geeky News๐ SharePoint and OneDrive now support MarkdownMicrosoft just added native Markdown support to SharePoint and OneDrive. You can now create, view, and edit .md files directly in the browser. No extra tools. No downloading and reopening elsewhere. The editor has a formatting toolbar, real-time preview, and a split mode so you can see source and rendered output side by side. Tables, code blocks, checkboxes all render properly. If you've never touched Markdown, it's worth knowing. It's becoming the quiet standard for how AI systems store and share context. AI agents in Microsoft 365 are increasingly using Markdown files to store instructions, preferences, and repeatable processes. This update gives teams a proper place to manage that content, with versioning and access controls already built in. ๐ Microsoft adds AI watermarks to content in Microsoft 365If you create videos, audio, or images using AI tools in Microsoft 365, you can now add a watermark to signal that AI was involved. Visual watermarks on video. Audible watermarks on audio. A visible stamp on generated images. For work accounts, IT admins control the video and audio policy. Individual users control it for images. For personal Microsoft accounts, it's opt-in from your privacy dashboard, off by default. There's also metadata added behind the scenes, even when the visible watermark is off. It won't affect most Excel users day to day. But if you're creating AI-generated content that gets shared externally, it's worth knowing the option exists. ๐จ ChatGPT Images 2.0 can think before it drawsOpenAI just released a new image generation model. The headline feature: it reasons through your prompt before generating anything. It can search the web too. So if you ask for a banner referencing a real brand's colors, it looks them up rather than guessing. Text rendering is significantly better too. Paid users can generate up to eight consistent images from one prompt. Free users get improved quality but no reasoning mode and no batch generation. And if you're on Copilot, you'll have to wait - it's only available through Azure for now. ๐ Not a programmer...Donna works in supply chain. No programming background. Not even close. She took Python in Excel for the Real World anyway. She now knows how Python thinks, where to find answers when she gets stuck, and what it can do for data work at her job. That's why I made that course. It's built for Excel people, not programmers. See you next week, Leila When you're ready, here are some ways we can help: ๐ Join 400,000+ 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.
For years, I did something I'm a little embarrassed to admit now. Every time I needed to present pivot table data, I'd copy it out. Paste it as values into a separate sheet. Then format it manually. My pivot table stayed hidden in the background like a rough draft nobody was allowed to see. Why did I do this? Pivot table default styles are just ugly. Nothing to impress management with. It never occurred to me that the pivot table itself could look like this: Yes. That's a pivot table. Fully...
You have a list of messy text. You need to filter it down to only rows that contain a 4-digit product code. Me in 2004 would have done it manually. Me in 2014 would have used VBA. Me now? Just 60 seconds with one formula. The function is called REGEXTEST. It's relatively new in Excel, and once you see what it does, you'll wonder how you worked without it. ๐ Check out the short video here REGEXTEST tells you if a pattern exists. But there are two sister functions also worth knowing:...
Here's a situation I hear about all the time. Someone leaves. Could be a data analyst, could be the "Excel person" on the team. And whoever's left behind is now responsible for spreadsheets they didn't build and reports they don't fully understand. Someone wrote in from our survey recently, an administrator at a charity. The analyst who set everything up moved on, and now it's her job to keep it all running. She's watching YouTube videos to figure out how to create charts. She's using a pivot...