XelPlus is a leading online education company, providing training courses for Excel, Power BI, Finance, and Google Sheets. XelPlusโ bestselling courses are popular among financial analysts, CFOโs, and business owners. Technology is changing fast. We help our members turn confusion into confidence with every skill learnt.
My VBA macro finally has a real replacement
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Some tasks shouldn't still exist in 2026. Manually emailing PDF reports at end of month is one of them... but they do. Here's the drill: Open Excel. Save a few sheets as PDF. Email to Manager A. Save others as PDF. Email to Manager B. Repeat. I used to have a VBA macro that did that for me. It was great. Until companies started blocking macros. Until Excel Online became a thing. Now there's a solution built into Excel that works on desktop and the web. You decide who gets which sheets. The script does the rest. No AI agent needed. I walk you through it in this week's video. You can even schedule it to run while you sleep with a simple Power Automate setup. ๐ค Geeky News๐ค Excel's Copilot edits are now trackableWhen someone on your team uses Copilot to change a workbook, you can now see it clearly in the Show Changes pane. The edit gets flagged with a Copilot icon so you know exactly what a human changed versus what AI touched. Available now in Excel for the web, coming to other platforms soon (if you're on Beta, you may already see it on Desktop). If you want to learn how Show Changes helps you track the edits, here's our tutorial. ๐ Copilot's new place and new shortcutLike we mentioned last week, Microsoft is doubling down on making Copilot harder to ignore, with the floating Copilot button showing up in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. The update simplifies Copilot down to two entry points and adds smarter contextual suggestions based on what you've selected. Select a word, get word-level suggestions. Select a section, get broader ones. And if you navigate with a keyboard, F6 now activates the Copilot button across all platforms. ๐ถ Windows 11 might be getting new system soundsMicrosoft is teasing a refresh of its Windows sound design. For anyone who's used Windows long enough, this is a bit of a nostalgia trigger. Those old startup sounds are a trip down memory lane. Nothing officially confirmed, but keep your ears peeled. ๐ Compound interest. But for your ExcelSteffi is a Senior Financial Analyst. She just finished Automate Excel: Power Query & Power Automate Recipes. I love how she used compounding interest here: Thanks for sharing, Steffi. And enjoy the compounding. I'm off to the Global Excel Summit next week. Looking forward to meeting some of you there. You can expect my highlights from the sessions in the next edition of "Between the Sheets." ๐ Until then, Leila When you're ready, here are some ways we can help: ๐ Join 400,000+ members in our coursesโ ๐บ Get free tutorials on YouTubeโ ๐ฅ 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! |
Leila Gharani - XelPlus
XelPlus is a leading online education company, providing training courses for Excel, Power BI, Finance, and Google Sheets. XelPlusโ bestselling courses are popular among financial analysts, CFOโs, and business owners. Technology is changing fast. We help our members turn confusion into confidence with every skill learnt.
When I worked in finance, the reports I had to build almost always came from more than one sheet. A lot of copy-pasting. These days one formula can do that for you. It's called VSTACK. It stacks your sheets into one list. It stays live, works in Excel Online, and anyone who opens the file knows exactly what's happening. Most people who use VSTACK, use it to glue two ranges together, and think that's it. But that's barely scratching the surface. I put together my top 6 VSTACK tips in this new...
The most common way people mess up their own spreadsheets is a button sitting right there on the Home tab. Merge & Center. It's one of the first buttons anyone learns in Excel, and it does exactly what it says: centers a title, makes a header look tidy. The trouble starts the moment someone uses it inside the data instead of just the header row. Try to sort... yep, it doesn't work. Try to sum a column with a merged cell sitting in the middle of it. Column E, for example: Exactly. You'd have...
What do you do when your data goes wide? Picture a sales table with one row per rep, but then Sales_Jan, Units_Jan, Sales_Feb, Units_Feb, and so on, all the way to December. It just keeps growing wider with every month you add. Try to filter by month, or build a pivot table around it, and you're stuck. Month isn't a value in this table. It's baked into the column headers. You need a way to turn the wide into long so that it's ready for analysis. And there's a Python function that does exactly...