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 Excel feature that quietly watches everything
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You open the file. The formula’s broken. The chart’s gone. Cell colors? A rainbow mess. You don’t know who did it. Doesn’t matter. Excel’s Version History has your back. It quietly keeps snapshots of your file, so you can rewind, review, and restore past versions. Find out what changed, when, and roll back if needed. Fix the mess. No drama. No blame. (BTW, if you want to create a dashboard like the one on the right - before someone took a sledgehammer to it 🔨 - check out our Dashboard Practice Pack.) 🤓 Geeky News🏃➡️ Get to Word fasterStarting in May, Word will pre-load itself quietly in the background as your computer boots. So when you’re ready to write, it’s already stretched and warmed up. Microsoft is calling it Startup Boost. It pauses the app until you actually open it, saving time without hogging resources. Your PC will need at least 8GB of RAM and 5GB of free disk space. And don’t worry - you can turn it off in Word settings if you’re not into stealthy apps lurking at startup. Other Office apps will get the same upgrade soon. Stay tuned! 🧰 New quick launcher from PowerToysIf you love handy shortcuts, check out the new Command Palette in PowerToys. It lets you open apps, folders, files, run system commands, search the web - all from one spot. Just press Win + Alt + Space to launch it. It’s similar to the existing Run tool (Alt + Space), but with a fresh design and support for WinGet, so you'll soon be able to install apps too. Both tools work side by side for now, but Command Palette is the future. Update PowerToys and give it a spin - it’s free and seriously useful. I'm a big fan. If you haven't heard about it before, check out this video 🤔 Did You Know?Double-click Format Painter to lock it in. Seriously. You don’t have to click the brush every single time you want to copy formatting across multiple cells. Just double-click once, and it remembers. Done? Hit Esc or click the brush again to release the lock. You can use Excel for decades and still miss some of the small tricks that make everything easier. 👏 Power StoriesI picture Sariyya, late one evening, staring at a Power BI report thinking… “There has to be a better way.” She knew her data. She knew her team. But those tricky transformation steps and the whole world of Power Automate? That part felt just out of reach. Instead of giving up or guessing her way through, she joined the Automate with Power Query and Power Automate course. Now she's the one leading the way. These are the moments that mean the most to me. When someone finds a way forward. When it clicks. That’s why I do what I do. Well done, Sariyya. 👏
No newsletter next week - we're hitting a brief pause (so you can too 😉) While we’re elbow-deep in Python in Excel land, you get a break from tech news. Enjoy the quiet—big stuff coming soon. Talk to you soon, 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.
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Excel's chart formatting menu is dangerous. Not because it's bad. Because it gives you too many options. And some of them have no place in a professional report. Take this social media trend: pasting images directly into your chart bars. Looks creative. Gets lots of views on YouTube. But would you put that in front of your manager? In just a few extra clicks, the same data can look like this: Same logos. Matching brand colors. Just used with intention. 👉 Watch: How to build this chart in just...
Excel remembers things you teach it. That's not AI. It's a Custom List. And it's been hiding in Excel Options the whole time. That's how you get to automatically fill down months or days of the week. And you can build your own: team names, department codes, project phases - anything you type over and over. Excel learns the order too. So "Mon, Tue, Wed..." or your custom categories fill in automatically. The list lives on your device, not in the file. Set it up once. Use it in every workbook,...