My Favorite Pivot Table Hacks 💁‍♀️


3 things we’re covering today:

  • Copilot & Bard Updates 🤖
  • Cool Pivot Table Hacks 🥷
  • My brand-new Power Query course 🥳

Oh, and apologies if you got 2 versions of this email - we had a technical error!

🎬 Crazy Pivot Table Hacks

In my latest video I share all my secret Excel Pivot Table tips.

These are the ‘hidden’ or lesser-known features turn you into the Pivot Table master of your company 😉

Two of my favorites:

1. The Invisible Pivot Table… 🧐
This lets you use a Pivot Table slicer without actually showing the Pivot Table itself in your workbook, so everything looks nice and clean. Plus you can grab data from other places and show it in the same table. Almost like magic. 🪄

2. Disable View Details
If you’re in a Pivot Table and want to quickly view the details of any fields, you can double-click on a value field to create a separate page with all the details. But this can be annoying - especially if you share the file with colleagues. Here’s how to disable that feature.

🚀 presentaid

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Thank you to presentaid for sponsoring today’s newsletter.

🤓 Geeky News

🌈 Google Bard AI - Public Release

Google just made their ChatGPT competitor Bard AI fully open to the public.

And it works really well!

OpenAI may have had a head start with ChatGPT. But Bard has a stronger dataset, because it can access all of Google’s data: YouTube transcripts, Google Search Index, etc.

This is a big step in the AI arms race.

🤖Microsoft 365 Copilot - Exciting Updates Rolled Out

Microsoft have updated their already very powerful Copilot AI assistant. You can now:

  • Get writing coaching in Outlook 📝
  • Produce AI ideas and designs in Whiteboard 💡
  • Generate DALL-E images inside PowerPoint 🎨

And a lot more!

🌈 Gmail - Will Google Delete Your Old Gmail Account?

Google’s new ‘inactive account’ policy means they’ll delete any account that haven’t been used for two years.

And yes, that includes all emails, documents, Drive storage, and Photos storage associated with the account. So, set a reminder in your calendar to log in every now and then!

The new policy comes into effect on January 1st, 2024.

👥 Teams - New Together Mode

Microsoft has improved the Together mode in Teams by adding reactions, raised hands, and name labels under each user’s image. Now you can tell who’s who, and understand people’s reactions a bit better!

💚 My Favorite Things

💁‍♀️My New Power Query Course
I’m thrilled to announce that we’re working on a new Power Query Recipe course, set for release in mid-June!

I’ve designed this course to address the common themes and questions that many of you have shared. My current Power Query course is HUGE - you’d have to dedicate lots of time to get through it.

That’s why this recipe course will be the perfect addition. It’ll give practical, immediate solutions to real-world problems (all those Power Query pitfalls 🤦‍♀️) and even direct you to the right lecture in the main course if you want more background and information.

Registration is set to open at the end of May!

🚀 Power Stories

I got this lovely message from Jeff on LinkedIn, which made my day! 💚

He agreed I could share his success in the newsletter:

For what it’s worth, you have been a huge asset in my career.

I got promoted years back, had to take over a department, and got handed spreadsheets to figure out allocations of 5000+ skus while allocating $millions from vendors over those skus based on run rates…

I had no idea! Many weekends on Google and watching your channel… Fast forward years later, and I hate anyone who tells me I can’t live in excel!

Long winded I know - but wanted to let you know you’re doing great work, and helping people along the way.

- Jeff

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

Want more?

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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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