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.
One function doing the job of five
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Remember this? =RIGHT(A2, LEN(A2) - SEARCH(" ",A2)) You just wanted the last name. Now you're doing math. Or this one: =OFFSET(A4, COUNTA(A5:$A$29) -12 +ROW(A1),0,1,1) All that... just to get the last 12 months of data? Well… not anymore. Compare that to: =TEXTAFTER(A2," ") Or =TAKE(A5:.B29,-12) These newer functions are easier to read, easier to write, and do exactly what you need. No nesting. No helper columns. A tiny part of me misses the struggle. Plus they were a good workout. 😅 But yeah. It’s nice to keep things simple. In case you haven't been keeping up... ➡️ Here's an overview plus a file to practice. 🤓 Geeky NewsThe big news in the Excel world last week was pivot tables finally getting Auto-Refresh. 🤯 But I haven't been in the lucky 50% of Insiders this time (Beta features drop in stages), so I haven't been able to test it yet. Once I do get it, I'll let you know what I think. In other news... 👓 Copilot has better VisionCopilot Vision now sees your whole screen. The feature that lets the AI understand what you’re looking at on your screen used to only view two apps at a time. Now it can scan your entire desktop or any window you choose. This is not like Recall - the other AI feature that takes screenshots of all your digital activity. Copilot Vision only sees what you explicitly share, like screen sharing in a video call. Turn it on, point it at what you're working on, and get real-time help, whether it's your resume, a design, or a tricky UI. Now rolling out to Windows Insiders. 💻 Windows 11 finally pulls aheadIt took almost four years, but Windows 11 has finally passed Windows 10 in desktop market share. It now sits at 52%. Adoption was slow, mostly due to strict hardware requirements that left older PCs behind. Meanwhile, support for Windows 10 ends this October. Microsoft's offering a year of free security updates if you turn on Windows Backup and sync your Documents to OneDrive. This also affects Microsoft 365 subscribers who'll stop receiving non-security updates on Windows 10 after certain cut-off points. 💚 My Favorite Things - Pasting Multiple ItemsPeople are still just discovering this one: Win + V to open your clipboard history. Yes, it remembers everything you copied: text, images, even emojis. 👏 Data Engineering & PoetryTwo worlds that weren’t meant to meet. That’s how David described learning Python in Excel. And yes. It feels strange at first. But then, slowly, as you work through the examples something shifts. Yes, you now know Python. But you also get a different way of approaching problems. That's the real milestone. And when it clicks. You'll know. The first certificates (and badges) in our Python in Excel for the Real World were issued. 🎊 Super proud of everyone who's already earned theirs 👏 as well as the students still making their way through the course. Keep going! 💪 See you next week, Leila Want more?▶️ Subscribe on YouTube 🖇️ Follow us on LinkedIn 🥇 Join 400,000+ students in our courses 📣 Want to sponsor Between the Sheets? Get in touch here. 📨 If you were forwarded this message, you can get the free weekly email here. This newsletter contains affiliate links, which give us a small commission on any purchase made at no cost to you. This helps us run Between the Sheets and bring you updates like this. 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. 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.
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...