The Excel feature that quietly watches everything


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.

👉 Here’s how to use it—fast.

(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 faster

Starting 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 PowerToys

If 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 Stories

I 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. 👏

The most understandable and convenient course I have taken. I work with Power BI and felt gaps in my knowledge of query transformation, and I also wanted to learn how to automate work using Power Automate. This course came in handy. Now I can work more efficiently with colleagues and automate the sending and processing of files.
Sariyya Abdullayeva, Deputy Chief Economist

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.

Read more from Leila Gharani - XelPlus

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...

I kept closing Copilot Chat the second it popped up. Every time I logged into Microsoft 365, there it was: I just wanted to get to my apps. This new interface felt like one more thing in the way. Well, finally I gave in. Started experimenting to see which prompts could actually reduce friction. For example, I don't look forward to going through unread emails on Monday morning. Especially when I see 47 emails waiting for me. That's friction. I also waste a lot of time looking for files. I...

You know that chart exists. You made it. It's in this workbook somewhere. Sheet14? 16? Who named these sheets anyway? Excel has a Navigator for this. Most people still don't know it's there. View > Navigation. It opens a pane on the side with a list of all your tabs. You can easily jump between them. Expand any tab, and you'll see an overview of all the contents in the sheet. All your tables, pivot tables, charts, slicers, and any other objects, like shapes and pictures. Use the search box to...