​

3 things we're covering today:

• AI Copilot updates
• Navigating the ribbon more efficiently
• Voting opens for the Global Excel Awards (until June 4th)

🎬 How to Use Excel's New TAKE Function

Excel’s TAKE function is a lot more powerful than I initially thought. It’s quickly becoming one of my “everyday” tools for data analysis.

In fact, it’s so good I made a full video to show you how to use it! I answer your most common questions, including:

• What’s the difference between TAKE and CHOOSECOLS / CHOOSEROWS?
• Can we combine TAKE with FILTER?
• Is TAKE the easier version of OFFSET?

This replaces a lot of the complicated formula combinations I used to have.

Maybe it can replace yours. 🤔

🚀 presentaid​

Want to work more efficiently in PowerPoint and Excel? In that case, I highly recommend presentaid!

​Presentaid helps you create better slides in less time. With this MS Office addin you can create, align, and style your slides and shapes with less clicks than ever before. Sticking to your corporate design with pixel perfect slides has never been easier.

With their unique feature of providing an interface between Excel and PowerPoint, you can even create entire PowerPoint slides based on your Excel data at the push of a button - fully automated.

Ready to give it a try? Sign up for a free trial at https://landing.presentaid.com/leila and save 33% on your first subscription with coupon code “Leila0523”.

Thank you to presentaid for sponsoring today’s newsletter.

🤓 Geeky News

🤖 Windows 11 - Copilot Update​

Microsoft have announced that they’re bringing Copilot directly to Windows. You’ll have an AI-powered personal assistant right there on your desktop!

They’re also extending Bing Chat Plugins to Windows, to let developers integrate their apps with Copilot.

So we’ll see a lot more of Copilot soon.

Oh, and interesting news for those of you who use different archive formats! As part of this update, Windows 11 is getting native support for RAR, Tar, 7-zip, gz, and a few others.

👥 Teams - Shuffle Participants in Meetings​

Teams has new Shuffle capabilities. You can use them to:

• Randomly assign participants to rooms
• Shuffle everyone (Shuffle >Everyone)
• Distribute new participants to existing rooms (Shuffle >Only unassigned participants).

To understand breakout rooms and how to use them, check out my video.

🎗️ Office 365 - Navigate the Ribbon More Efficiently (currently available in Office Insiders)

Navigating through the ribbon using your keyboard (Word, Excel, and PowerPoint) used to be a real pain. If you went to select “Insert” and then “Shapes,” you’d have to navigate through a massive gallery of over 100 options - using just your arrow keys.

But Microsoft have just introduced tab stops for each group of tools on the ribbon. You can now quickly hop to the desired group, bypassing all the irrelevant ones.

No more endless scrolling!

💚 My Favorite Things

🏆Global Excel Awards - Voting open until June 4th​

It’s an honor to be a Finalist in two categories of the Global Excel Awards!

• Most Influential Professional in the Excel Industry
• Most Obscure Use of Excel (for my ChatGPT inside Excel experiment?)

If you’d like to vote for me, it would mean the world. 💚

Anyone can take part, and the deadline is June 4th. So vote now before you forget!

You can also vote in other categories - the “Lifetime achievement” category is especially difficult for me. I’d vote for all three candidates if I could – Bill, Bob and Liam.

🎓New Power Query Course - Join the Waitlist​

I’m working on a new course: Automate with Power Query: Recipes to Solve Business Data Challenges! I’m super excited about this one.

All our cases are inspired by real questions and challenges faced by Business customers in our existing Power Query course.

We’ll also cover automation tools like Power Automate and Office Scripts, to give you a full picture of the possibilities.

Join the waiting list here: https://pages.xelplus.com/automatepq_interest​

🚀 Power Stories

Thank you to Zulkarnain for this amazing feedback after finishing Master Power Query: Beginner to Pro course 💚 It’s never too late to learn Power Query.

And it’s becoming must-have knowledge for data analysts applying to new jobs:

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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