Keep your zeros, keep your sanity

Ever typed an account number like 00123 in Excel… only for it to turn into 123? 😤

Excel thinks it's helping. But sometimes, we need those leading zeros - for IDs, ZIP codes, or product codes.

The good news? You’ve got two easy ways to keep them:

1️⃣ Custom Number Formatting

Tell Excel: “Hey, I want five digits, even if the first ones are zeros.”

Just:

Select your cells
Press Ctrl + 1 (or right-click → Format Cells)
Go to the Number tab → Custom
Type 00000 (or however many digits you need)

Boom. Excel displays 00123 and doesn’t drop the zeros.

But the number is still a number. 00123 is really just 123 in disguise.

🎥 Watch how it's done or learn what else can be done with custom number formatting.

2️⃣ Turn off automatic conversions (Excel 365)

This is new. Excel now gives you more control!

To stop it from “helpfully” converting your text to numbers in the first place.

Go to:

File > Options > Data > Automatic Data Conversions

Uncheck "Remove leading zeros and convert to a number".

From now on, if you enter 00123, it will be stored as text and keep the leading zeros.

Same with any future ID or code starting with 0, regardless of its length.

🎥 Watch it in action (note: it's no longer in Beta and it has moved tabs - from Advanced to Data)

🤔 So which one should you use?

If you want Excel to treat the value like a number (for sorting or formulas), go with custom formatting.
If your data is really just text (like ID codes), and you need it exactly as typed, disable the auto-conversion.

Whichever method you choose, your zeros are safe. 🙌

🚸 Excel for Kids? Start them young!

Today’s International Children’s Day (and next week for the U.S.), so we’ve got something a little special for you:

📖 Excel-Explained-to-Kids.pdf

No, your kids probably didn’t ask for this 😄 but it’s never too early to get curious.

Creating this was a fun challenge - distilling Excel down to its simplest form.

After all, if you can explain it to a child, you truly get it.

Simplifying forces clarity, and clarity builds confidence.

Go ahead, give it a look (or share it with a mini spreadsheet fan). 😊

🤓 Geeky News

✂️ Snipping Tool gets even more cool updates

The Snipping Tool is slowly turning into a Swiss Army knife and we’re here for it.

First, it borrowed the Text Extractor from PowerToys. It allows you to copy text straight from images or paused videos, no screenshot needed.

Now it's also taken over the Win + Shift + T shortcut to get to it even faster.

And it introduces a Color Picker which can identify the color code from anywhere on the screen. That's super handy when you're designing dashboards.

No dedicated shortcut yet - you can access it from the Snipping Tool (Win + Shift + S) toolbar.

Both features started in PowerToys, by the way. But PowerToys doesn't come pre-installed, so most people miss out on these super useful tools. So it’s great to see Windows baking them into the app everyone already has.

Oh, and the Snipping Tool’s screen recorder just got an upgrade too:

You can now trim the beginning and end of your recordings. No more awkward pauses.
And yes, you can also save recordings as GIFs.

(I'm saying 'jif' and sticking to it… but we’re not here to start a war. 🙃)

📊 Smarter filtering in Power BI slicers

The May 2025 release of Power BI Desktop is here, and looks like the devs have been busy.

One highlight? Working with long lists in Power BI just got easier.

You can now paste values directly into List and Button slicers (currently in Preview).

Imagine your manager sent you an Excel file with 50 product codes. She wants to know how those specific products perform.

You need to filter the report to only those.

Instead of checking boxes one by one, just copy the list and hit Ctrl + V on the slicer. Done.

This works great for:

Filtering by a long list of customer names, SKUs, IDs
Hierarchies too, like “2025 Q2 Q3” for selecting specific quarters

(Each value goes on a new line, and tabs separate levels like year/quarter.)

It saves a ton of time when working across tools or updating reports from external lists.

Also, the List slicer itself got a big glow-up, giving report designers more control over its look and behavior.

👏 Scaling with Power BI

When you’ve already used Excel to manage a multi-million dollar fundraising campaign, what’s next?

For Christian, it was scaling that impact with Power BI.

After completing the Fast Track to Power BI course, he reached out to share how he’s now helping his entire organization adopt smarter reporting tools:

Within my organisation, we've just launched a team of 'Citizen Developers' where business experts are building financial reports without help from our IT services.

Though a lot of the members are great with Excel, they were almost all new to Power BI.

So I've recommended this course to all of them because, like the title says, it's a 'fast track'. So you're up and running really quickly and effectively.

Last year, I was managing a multi-million dollar national fundraising for United Way for my organization (which employs over 10k people) with Excel.

Although it was manageable for me, I was not able to share results easily with stakeholders across multiple management levels.

Now, with Power BI, we have different reports available depending on the role of the user and everything updates automatically!

Christian Fiset, Citizen Developer Team Lead

From personal growth to organizational change, Christian shows what’s possible with a learning mindset. 🙌

See you next week,

Leila

P.S. Last week, we opened up the Python in Excel for the Real World course to our insiders - over 1,000 members enrolled, and the feedback has been amazing! 😍 They’ve already completed the first sections, and I’m busy finalizing the remaining videos. If you missed out, no worries. The public launch is set for June 25th. Stay tuned!

Leila Gharani - XelPlus