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.
Reorganizing data the hard way?
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You've got a long list like this that needs to go into separate columns. Copy-paste? Nope. From now on copy-paste is officially banned for this type of work ๐ซ There's a single function that does the whole thing in seconds. ๐ Here's how it worksโ Imagine copy-pasting 500 contacts! My wrist cramps up even thinking about it. ๐ค Geeky NewsCopilot in Outlook now handles your calendarMicrosoft just made Copilot in Outlook agentic. Meaning it doesn't wait for you to ask. It sorts through your inbox, drafts follow-ups for emails that went unanswered, creates inbox rules, and reschedules calendar conflicts on its own. You can also ask it to catch you up after a vacation, protect your focus time, or prep you for an upcoming meeting. Available now through Microsoft's Frontier program. Whether you want your AI to have that much access to your inbox is, of course, a personal decision. ๐ ๐ค Copilot in Excel improvementsMicrosoft added a few useful controls to Copilot in Excel. The toggle between the default Edit mode (Copilot makes the changes directly) and Chat mode (Copilot advises, you implement) is now easier to find. Plus another mode is coming: Plan mode. In it, Copilot shows you the steps it intends to take before touching anything. You can review and adjust before anything changes. Useful when you're about to let AI loose on a file that took you three hours to build. And Advanced Analysis with Python is (supposed to be) back. Copilot can create Python charts and other visual outputs as part of your requested edits. I don't seem to have this update yet. The Python visuals I get from Copilot are static images, not connected to cell values like they used to be. When I ask for the connected version, it tells me it can't do that. It offers to give me the code to copy and paste. Which didn't work, by the way. ๐ So we've gone backwards with Copilot for Python in Excel. Hoping this new update fixes it. ๐ More AI capabilities in Google SheetsNot to be outdone, Google packs more AI into Sheets. Three updates dropped at once:
All rolling out through May to paid Workspace plans. They're also improving Sheets overall capacity. Large files open up to 30% faster, filtering is up to 60% faster, and the cell limit is doubling from 10M to 20M cells in beta. Available to all Google Workspace users. ๐ค Did You Know?What if you want to "unwrap" rows, get them back into a single column? There's another function for that: TOCOL(). Feed it any table, and it will return it as a column. Want the data in a single cell, as a comma delimited list? Use ARRAYTOTEXT(). Handy when you need to feed data into another tool and it only accepts a flat list. ๐ Part of my toolkitLili just finished Fast Track to Power BI and posted this on LinkedIn: Congrats, Lili. Always nice to see Power BI showing up on people's resumes. See you next week, 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...