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.
Just because Excel lets you doesn't mean you should
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Excel's chart formatting menu is dangerous. Not because it's bad. Because it gives you too many options. And some of them have no place in a professional report. Take this social media trend: pasting images directly into your chart bars. Looks creative. Gets lots of views on YouTube. But would you put that in front of your manager? In just a few extra clicks, the same data can look like this: Same logos. Matching brand colors. Just used with intention. 👉 Watch: How to build this chart in just a few clicks 🤓 Geeky News✈️ Microsoft Copilot: agents taking overHard to shake the impression that since its launch, Microsoft 365 Copilot has been mostly undergoing rebrands. Here's another one. Perhaps that's unfair. It has also been gaining capabilities. But it's hard to keep track with all the interface changes. Take Excel for example. First, there was just Copilot, then it was split into AppSkills and Chat. Later we got Agent Mode, and AppSkills were retired, keeping Chat as the default. Now Agent Mode is retiring and we have "Edit with Copilot" as the default experience. So, we're kind of back at the start. One Copilot that can do stuff inside your workbook (or doc or slide deck). It just can do much more now. And it no longer relies only on the OpenAI model, but switches between OpenAI and Claude, whichever best suits the task at hand. You can turn off the Agent or Edit mode to get back to the Chat experience, which gives you more control. And if you're confused by all this, welcome to the club. 🖼️ PowerPoint now has a built-in image editorNo more jumping to Photoshop just to touch up an image. PowerPoint now lets you edit images directly in your deck. Select any image on your slide and hit Edit Image. You get: background removal, object moving or erasing, auto-enhance for lighting and contrast, resolution upscaling, and text editing directly on the image. Changes preview in real time. Hit Update and it applies directly to your slide. Rolling out now to PowerPoint for the web. 💻 A European alternative to Microsoft 365 just launchedEver wondered whether your company files are safe from US government access? It's certainly a hot button topic in Europe. Office.eu launched in March from the Netherlands. Documents, spreadsheets, presentations, email, storage. All hosted on EU servers, under EU law. Under the hood it's Nextcloud and Collabora Online (think LibreOffice in the cloud). So don't expect Excel-level functionality. It can open Microsoft file formats like .xlsx, but complex formulas and macros may not survive the trip. Still early days. Pricing isn't public yet. But if data residency matters in your organization, worth keeping an eye on. 🙌 From standard to standing outAnyone can make a chart. Not everyone can make one that actually lands. Paul wasn't happy with the same old, same old. He mastered Business Charts in Excel and had this to say: Yes, standard charts can get boring. But the answer is not adding more clutter. 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.
Excel remembers things you teach it. That's not AI. It's a Custom List. And it's been hiding in Excel Options the whole time. That's how you get to automatically fill down months or days of the week. And you can build your own: team names, department codes, project phases - anything you type over and over. Excel learns the order too. So "Mon, Tue, Wed..." or your custom categories fill in automatically. The list lives on your device, not in the file. Set it up once. Use it in every workbook,...
You know that feeling when you're staring at two lists in Excel, trying to spot what's missing? Maybe a product catalog. A list of invoices versus payments. Or a guest list like the below: Whatever it is... checking which one is on the first list but not on the second is.... very slow. And you will miss something. There's a faster way. One conditional formatting rule, and Excel flags every mismatch for you. The second something changes, the highlighting updates too. About a minute to watch....
Pie charts get a bad rep. And honestly? Fair. I'm not a total hater. Two or three slices and a pie chart can tell a perfectly good story. But here's what actually happens in that meeting room when you've got 8+ slices on screen. People glance at the legend, look back at the chart... and have absolutely no idea what they're looking at. They won't say that, of course. Instead, the room either moves on a little too quickly or starts asking questions the chart should have already answered. Either...