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.
From monster formulas to neat solutions
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You know that Excel file that takes forever to load? It might be this one little thing: =E:E Full-column references like that are sneaky. They seem harmless - until Excel starts scanning a million blank cells... again and again. Yeah. That's why your file is crawling. Stack a few of these full-column formulas across multiple sheets? 🐌 You feel it. Say hello to Trim Refs – Excel’s subtle new feature that quietly fixes the mess. Want to see how it works? Watch this demo 👇 One tiny dot making such a big difference. And before the table police come after me – yes, tables are best practice. That's what I generally recommend. But let’s be real: we don't always use tables. So when we don’t, it's good to have this option. Definitely better than the ugly alternative 😉 Good news: Trim Refs (and TRIMRANGE) should now be available to everyone in the Current and Monthly Enterprise update channels of Microsoft 365 on Windows. Simply update your Excel to the latest version. 👉 Download the workbook to try it out yourself. If Trim Refs impressed you, just wait until you discover what Excel’s other newer tools can really do. Seriously. Where were these features 10 years ago? They would’ve made my life so much easier. But here’s the crazy part: A lot of people who have access to these tools don’t even know they exist. They’re still using Excel the same way they did a decade ago. That’s why I created the Excel Black Belt Bundle - so you’re not stuck using yesterday’s skills on today’s problems. And because Excel keeps evolving, we’re constantly updating the bundle to keep you ahead. 🤓 Geeky News👥 New apps in Microsoft 365 (great for the forgetful)Ever struggled to remember a colleague's name? Meet the People app – your shortcut to learning who’s who. Search for people by job title, department, location and project. See their profile cards and org charts. You can even fire off a quick Teams message directly from the People app. All without breaking your workflow. It just launched for Microsoft 365 Insiders (Business or Enterprise). 📂 Also rolling out: File Search. It gives you easy access to all your Office files. Even if you forget the file name, find it by its content or by collaborator. Open or share files directly from the File Search app. 📲 Anonymous file sharing on MobileIf the previous update was for Business users, this one is for Personal accounts. You can now share Microsoft 365 files on iPhone and iPad with users without a Microsoft account. You still need to be logged in. When generating the sharing link, select "Anyone with the link can view" (or "can edit"). When recipients open the link, they'll be able to access the file even if they're not signed into the app. This already worked in Excel/Word/PowerPoint for the Web. Now it's rolling out to the iOS apps. 💻 Windows 11 will judge your hardwareIt's not as bad as it sounds. 😉 Windows Insiders discovered a new feature hidden in System Settings - a FAQ list on the About page. It tells you if you're running the latest version of Windows, if your RAM, GPU, and OS are up to speed for video, gaming, and overall smooth performance. Now if only it could tell us if we can handle a million-row VLOOKUP… 💚 Did You Know?I recently discovered that Teams improved pasting of hyperlinks. Forget about going into Formatting Options to "Insert Link". Forget even about the shortcut (Ctrl+K). Just select the text you want hyperlinked and paste the url over it. Simple. Clean. Love it. (Works in Loop too.) 👏 Power StoriesHuge congrats to Bharat for Mastering Excel Power Query 🎉 He called it “game-changing” – and we agree 💯. Enjoy the simplified workflows and automation, Bharat! 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?▶️ 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.
The good thing about Excel is formulas update automatically. Change an input, the output adjusts. Ok. You know that. But what if you want the output to be a specific number. What should the input be? Let's say, your boss is standing right by your shoulder, staring at your spreadsheet. "We need to reach $2,500 in revenue this month. How many units do we need to sell?" You could keep tweaking the units cell until you get close. Guess, check, guess again. Pleasant enough if you're alone. Not so...
Most people open ChatGPT, drop in an Excel file, and type two words. Analyze this. What comes back looks good. The numbers, the insights, the tidy summary. But how do you actually know if it's right? Last week I put ChatGPT through a proper test. A messy, multi-sheet sales file with codes, lookups, and calculations it had to figure out on its own. Then I verified the results myself with a data model in Excel. There's a specific workflow that makes the difference between trusting AI blindly...
I always build my formulas the same way. I include extra rows below my data, just in case someone adds more next month. And every time, I get a column with zeros. A blank row that should be invisible suddenly shows up as zero in the spilled list. Annoying, but there are ways around it. My go-to was to wrap in a FILTER. Recently it got a lot simpler. One function. Or even better, one character. Add a dot before or after the colon in your range, like A2:.A100, and Excel quietly drops the blank...