3 things we’re covering today:

• Big updates to ‘Image in Cell’
• Smart ‘YouTube Chips’ in Google Sheets
• My unhealthy relationship with success

🎬 The Secret Free Windows Tools Nobody is Talking About​

​

​My recent video is about a secret trove of 70+ free Windows tools called the Sysinternals suite. It’s owned by Microsoft, and has been around since 1996… but not many people know about it.

Sysinternal tools let you test for malware, prioritize certain operations (good for gamers), annotate your screen… and a lot more.

Some of the best examples:

1. ZoomIt: Magnify specific areas of your screen, annotate the screen with shapes and text, and screen-record. ZoomIt also has a ‘break’ timer feature, to stop you getting stuck in that chair!
2. Process Monitor: A powerful troubleshooting tool that captures real-time events related to the registry, file system, network, processes, and profiling. You can filter events depending on what you want to find, and create boot logs to analyze your system startup performance.
3. Autoruns: This helps you identify software that automatically runs when your device starts up. It gives you multiple tabs to categorize and narrow down your list of auto-start entries.
4. Process Explorer: Offers detailed information about running processes, including parent-child relationships, loaded DLLs, and threads. It can scan image signatures for viruses and identify processes that lock files, among other features.

And even better, these tools are all completely portable! So you don’t need an internet connection to run them.

Download the Sysinternals suite (or individual tools) here. Or check out my video to learn more. 😊

📢 Unlock the Power of Summaries with Shortform AI​

I love Shortform’s super-detailed book guides.

But now they're taking things to another level with the recent release of Shortform AI!

It’s game-changing browser extension that generates detailed summaries of blogs, articles, emails (and even YouTube videos) in a single click.

Add the extension to your browser, and you’ll be able to:

• 🔍 Preview content before diving in
• 🧠 Review key ideas from your favorite pieces of content
• 🌎 Learn background context to understand the issues better
• 📚 Understand counter-arguments to form a well-rounded opinion
• 📈 Explore related ideas to supercharge your learning

Even better, Shortform AI is included with Shortform's premium service at no extra cost.

Sign up here for a free trial at http://shortform.com/leila. XelPlus Weekly readers also get 25% off the annual subscription - that’s equivalent to 3 free months!

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

🤓 Geeky News

📊 Excel - Cool Updates to “Image in Cell”
​Microsoft have made several great updates to Image in Cell. You can now:

• Add Alt Text to pictures in cells, which will then appear in the filter dropdown, in the Pivot Table Filter, and in Pivot Table Slicers.
• Convert floating ‘pictures over cells’ to ‘pictures in cells’, and vice versa.

This was originally shared by Bill Jelen (aka MrExcel), my MVP colleague and ESPN co-host. I’ll have an update for you about ESPN in August!

📈 Power BI - Datasets in Power BI Mobile Apps
​You can now manage your Power BI datasets directly from the mobile app. So you can respond immediately to any problems while you’re on the go. You can also unlock users (who might need fresh data in their reports) straight from your phone.

🌈 Google Sheets - Data Extraction from Smart Chips
​In May 2023, Sheets added Data Extraction from Smart Chips. This is similar to the Data Types functionality in Excel. This means that when you insert smart chips into a spreadsheet, you can extract data from those smart chips into separate rows or columns. All while maintaining a connection with the chip that metadata was extracted from.

A very easy way to enrich your Sheets with information from people, file, and events chips!

🌈 Google Sheets - New “YouTube Chips”​

And there’s more! There are also new ‘YouTube Chips’ that let you automatically add YouTube data (like title, description, and video preview) directly into your spreadsheet cell.

Just copy/paste a YouTube link into the cell, hover over it, and click the “Chip” option included in the “Replace URL” hovercard. Sounds like a good way to curate your video watchlist for the summer 😉

💚 My Favorite Things

📚 Book - Effortless by Greg McKeown

I was so impressed by Greg McKeown’s book Essentialism that when his second book Effortless popped up in my Audible suggestions, I bought it immediately.

It’s all about building a sustainable work week, instead of getting trapped in an endless cycle of work + burnout.

At the beginning of the book Greg talks about a workaholic who’d defined success as hard work. I could relate to this so much! For many years I’ve not just felt that hard work is necessary for success, but that hard work is in fact success itself.

I can never properly enjoy a normal working day with breaks, because that must mean I’m slacking. This is obviously a mindset issue that I can’t overcome by reading one or two books. But I’m hoping that Effortless has started me in the right direction.

⭐ Award - Microsoft MVP for 2023/2024

I’m proud to say I’m a Microsoft MVP for another year! Microsoft renews MVP titles based on the work we’ve done for the community in the previous year, and this is my 6th award. Thank you for your continued support of my content, and your enthusiasm for learning. 💚

Find out more about the MVP award here.

🚀 Power Stories

Thank you David for this wonderful feedback on our Master Power Query - Beginner to Pro course! We're very happy that Power Query has made a big difference in working with Excel - to do things faster and doing more analysis. We appreciate you!

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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