Here's what I've noticed. The reports that look the cleanest in a meeting are almost always the hardest to work with.

Here's an example of a meeting-friendly table:

But wait until you need to create a Pivot Table or do quarterly or half-year analysis.

Then it's better to have the data in long format:

But how do you quickly turn wide into long?

👉 Here's the 1 minute formula video​

Power Query is an option for sure. A few clicks and you're done. But if your numbers are already in the sheet, there's a quicker way. One formula, and it updates automatically. No refresh needed.

What if the tedious 80% around your spreadsheets just... did itself? The pulling, the cleaning, the formatting, the Monday report — the work that eats your afternoons but never shows up in your job title. Letaido gives you AI teammates that handle it. Connect your data sources and its agents pull the numbers, run the analysis, and build the report — then hand you a draft to review. You stay in control and own the results. Think "agent mode" for your entire workflow, not just one cell. Built by the team behind Ahrefs — the same people trusted by millions of professionals for serious data tools. If you love making Excel do the heavy lifting, you'll love handing off the rest. ​Explore Letaido →​ Many thanks to Ahrefs for sponsoring this newsletter.

🤓 Geeky News

📊 Google Sheets finally gets combo charts

Last week I gave Google grief for adding 3D charts to Sheets. This week they announced combo charts, and now we're talking.

You can pair columns with a line, or split them across a secondary axis, which is exactly what you need for actual-vs-budget or total-vs-average comparisons.

It also fixes an annoying Excel import bug: combo charts with a secondary axis used to lose that axis on import. Not anymore.

Gradual rollout starts in August.

🎨 PowerPoint gets a design refresh

PowerPoint is getting 13 new SmartArt layouts (timelines, "Meet the Team" slides, that kind of thing), 13 new themes, and a cleaner Design ribbon so Colors, Fonts, and Layout aren't buried three clicks deep.

They also fixed the file-open screen so it's one progress bar instead of three fighting each other. Nice, but it's the SmartArt and themes people will actually notice.

📑 Planner gets reusable templates

You can now turn any Planner plan into a template. Tasks, buckets, labels, checklists, attachments - all of it gets saved and reused.

Publish it and share it with your Microsoft 365 group. The next time someone needs the same setup, they start from that instead of building it from scratch.

Think onboarding, campaign launches. In our case, development tracker for new courses.

🤔 How to combine data with different headers?

Let's say you need to combine data from different files, and each file names its columns differently. One says "Employee", another says "Name". Same data, different headers.

That's the new challenge we just added to the Power Query Challenges pack.

If you already have the pack, don't miss the new addition. It's going to keep growing too, so stay tuned for more drops.

People who've worked through it keep saying the same thing: it's not about getting the right answer, it's about getting there the smart way.

Peter put it well:

	It was the approach for all the challenges which I will take away most from this course. My methods were far more long-winded but the results were the same.
	Peter Bebbington, Management Accountant

And Gabriele picked up something most people never touch: tweaking the M code the interface generates to get results you can't get from clicking alone.

I have liked very much the way Leila shows how to change a bit the M code generated by the interface. This is something I am not so used to, even though I use Power Query for several tasks.
Gabriele Rebaudo, System Analyst

A good reminder why practice matters. It's not about speed. It's about seeing things you'd otherwise miss.

Have a great week ahead,

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!