Performance review season is coming up.

Your boss wants numbers. Growth numbers. Specifically, year-over-year growth.

When you can quickly show revenue grew 17% YOY and EBIT jumped 23%, you're telling a story. You're showing you understand what moved.

I put together a step-by-step guide on calculating YOY growth in Excel. It covers:

• The exact formula to use (simpler than you think)
• How to format it so it actually looks professional
• A conditional formatting trick so trends are obvious at a glance.

Takes 5 minutes to set up. Then you've got it for every quarterly review, budget meeting, or "quick analysis" your boss asks for at 4:30 PM on a Friday.

👉 Read the full guide here​

Download the practice workbook and try it yourself. Next time someone asks for year-over-year anything, you'll have it ready.

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🤓 Geeky News

📈 Excel's new shortcut for importing data

Forget Power Query? I wouldn't go that far 😉 But Excel just got new functions that make simple data imports faster.

IMPORTTEXT and IMPORTCSV pull data directly into the grid as a dynamic array. No Power Query UI needed. Just type the formula, point to your file (local or URL), and the data loads. Hit refresh when you need it updated.

IMPORTCSV is the simpler version with built-in defaults. IMPORTTEXT gives you more control over delimiters, encoding, and row filtering. Both work with the =COPILOT function if you want to ask questions about your imported data.

Rolling out to Insiders in the Beta channel.

📄 Word finally catches up on hyperlinks

You can now paste a URL directly onto highlighted text in Word, and it automatically creates a hyperlink.

No more right-click, insert hyperlink, paste, OK.

Just highlight and paste.

This already works in Teams and Loop. I'd like to see it in Outlook next.

📂 File Explorer getting more upgrades

​Copilot might soon live inside File Explorer instead of just popping out as a separate app.

Microsoft is testing a "Chat with Copilot" sidebar that stays docked in Explorer (you can detach it if you want).

Right now, the right-click Copilot button just launches a separate window. This would keep everything in one place.

Also, File Explorer search is getting a memory diet.

The idea is to eliminate duplicate file indexing operations, which means less RAM usage when you're searching for files. Faster searches, fewer background tasks eating up resources.

Both features are currently in Windows Insider builds. No word yet on when they'll roll out to everyone.

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🤔 Did You Know?

What if you need to calculate year-over-year (or month-over-month) change in a pivot table?

No formula here. Instead, you'll use "Show Values As" > "% Difference From".

🎥 Just like I show here.

Works on data in columns too. It's the base field that matters - and the sort order.

With this setup:

you'll want to use "% Difference From (next)".

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🙌 The tools you use every

Congrats to Tomasz on completing Pivot Table Mastery 🎉 and sharing this:

Pivot Tables are that tool you know exists but never quite learn properly.

Then you actually learn them.

And suddenly that hour-long data summarizing task takes five minutes. Reports that needed constant updating just... refresh themselves.

If Pivot Tables are still on your "someday" list, that's what this course fixes.

See you next week,

Leila

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When you're ready, here are some ways we can help:

🎓 Join 400,000+ members in our courses​

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