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.
My Favorite Excel Function 🤓
🔍 How to Use FILTER With Multiple Criteria
As you can tell from my latest video… I love the FILTER function.
It’s super flexible, easy to use, and lets you filter (surprise!) a range of data based on one or more criteria, returning all the rows that match your condition.
For example, you could search your company database for all employees in the Finance department with a salary of more than $30,000 like this:
But in my new video I cover some FILTER use cases that aren’t as obvious:
- How to FILTER based on multiple conditions. So not just AND conditions (all criteria met) but also OR conditions (either criteria met)
- Using CHOOSECOLS to return only the columns you need, instead of all the data
- How to FILTER multiple criteria in the same column
I also show you the “engine” behind the FILTER function, so you can tweak it to fit your needs.
Learn all these skills, and you’ll be a FILTER master! 🥇
📚 Shortform
Do you want to read more books? In that case, I highly recommend Shortform! 👇
Shortform offers high-quality guides to the world’s best non-fiction books. Each guide includes a concise 1-page summary, a longer chapter-by-chapter breakdown, and exercises to help you retain information.
One point that stuck with me from the Shortform guide to Deep Work (by Cal Newport) was the idea that “shallow work is deceptively bad because it feels productive and meaningful.” Answering emails and keeping up with the group chat on Teams might feel productive, but it’s actually Deep Work - tackling our most difficult problems - that leads to true fulfilment and happiness.
I try to keep that in mind every day.
Ready to give Shortform a try? Sign up for a free trial at http://shortform.com/leila, and get $50 off the annual subscription - that’s equivalent to 3 free months.
Thank you to Shortform for sponsoring today’s newsletter. 😊
🤓 Geeky News
🧪 Introducing Excel Labs!
Excel’s Advanced Formula Environment add-in was renamed to Excel Labs, as it’s being significantly expanded. This add-in lets Microsoft release experimental ideas to the public.
I’ve used the Advanced Formula Environment to write Lambda functions and other complex formulas, and find it much easier to work with than the formula bar.
Here’s my video all about it.
👑 Microsoft Leads the Field with Power BI
Microsoft has been named a leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Analytics and BI Platforms for the 16th consecutive year! They placed highest both in terms of completeness of vision and ability to execute.
Which shows how amazing Power BI is compared to other products like Salesforce and Oracle.
To make sure that you stay ahead of the curve (like Microsoft), consider enrolling in my self-paced XelPlus Fast Track to Power BI course. You’ll create awesome dashboards in no time. 😊
⚠️ Samsung Workers Made a Big ChatGPT Mistake
Samsung workers recently used ChatGPT to fix problems with their source code and convert meeting notes into presentations. But since ChatGPT retains user input to further train itself, these trade secrets have now effectively been ‘leaked’ to OpenAI, a potential competitor… 🤦♀️
Companies should figure out how to securely use AI tools rather than banning them outright. But as this story shows, they need to proceed with caution. Which brings us to…
🥷 Stop OpenAI From Using Your Company Data
To avoid AI security problems, Microsoft has developed Azure OpenAI. It lets you use AI to interact with your enterprise’s data, but without giving away sensitive information.
Azure’s Cognitive Search tool indexes and retrieves the most relevant pieces of information for each prompt from your organization’s dataset, and presents the top ranked results to the language model.
💚 My Favorite Things
🥇Global Excel Awards
Nominations are now open for the Global Excel Awards! Vote for your favorite Excel experts, and any other figures in the Excel community who you think deserve recognition.
If you enjoy my Excel tips and tricks, I’d be honored if you nominated me. 🥰
🧑🎨 An Excel-lent Artist
Who said Excel is just for data? Check out 82-year-old Japanese artist Tatsuo Horiuchi’s amazing Excel art!
🚀 Power Stories
Thank you Simon for this amazing review of our Fast Track to Power BI course! We love making dreams come true. 💚
You walk in knowing very little and you walk out an expert. It enriches your life, adds a skill to your skillset, and gives you a new way to look at data. I love analyzing data and have already battled through the different courses and teachings.
This for me just cemented that I am on the right track, and now with the new knowledge, the small wins for me will lead to my big win.
– Simon B.
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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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.
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