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.
Smarter checkboxes, no code required
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Tick it off. Time it. Done. ✅ Excel’s new checkboxes aren’t just easier to use - they’re surprisingly powerful. No more manually adding the timestamp or guessing when a task got done. You can now tick off a task and have Excel log the exact time it was completed. Automatically. No VBA. No scripts. Just a clever formula and a cool little trick. And the timestamp won’t budge - even if your cat walks across the keyboard and triggers a full-sheet refresh. (But be careful - with great power comes great responsibility. The trick relies on enabling iterative calculations, so you don't want to use it in important files. Save it for the simpler trackers.) 👉 See how it works or try it for yourself with our demo file. Microsoft just pulled the plug on ActiveX controls so if you’ve been clinging to those checkbox setups from the early 2000s... it might be time for an upgrade. The standard Form Controls are still there. But the new checkboxes are better. Sleeker. More intuitive. Perfect for to-do lists, trackers, and dashboards that actually impress. 🤓 Geeky News👨🏫 Smoother workflows in PowerPointPowerPoint got some love and attention with a slew of enhancements announced recently: 🖼️ Content placeholders are now interactive - when you click on the buttons inside the placeholder, they immediately insert the chosen object, or open selection options. No more back and forth between the ribbon and the slide. Convenient - I like it! 🔗 You can now link to slides in PowerPoint for the web (yeah, I didn't know you couldn't either; shows you how often I use the web version 🙃). 💬 Comments are now linked to the content rather than slides (so when you move the text or object, the comment goes with instead of staying behind). 💡 If you have an Enterprise Copilot license, no more staring at blank slides for you. You can take advantage of slide starters for structured content, like timeline, agenda, table, etc. 👨✈️ Word's Copilot Summary Just Got... a Lot WordierMicrosoft 365 Copilot in Word now comes with a beefed-up Summary. It can handle up to 3,000 pages and lets you pick between brief, standard, or detailed summaries. It's rolling out to Enterprise users on Windows, Mac, and Word on the Web. Coming soon: new tabs for Insights, Activity, Discussion, and Coaching. These will let you pull key stats, track recent edits, catch up on comments, and even get writing tips. They'll be dropping between May and August - first on the Web, then Desktop. It’s a handy upgrade if you’re working on long reports or collaborative docs. If you don't want to see it (because, honestly, not every document deserves a full executive debrief...):
💚 Did You Know?Ever wished Excel had a color picker like the one in PowerPoint? Well - how about one that will work anywhere? Because that's what Color Picker from PowerToys does. 🎞️ See for yourself 🎞️ To download PowerToys, click here. 👏 Power StoriesPower Query can be powerful - but only if you know where the traps are. Mariano was running into the usual suspects. Queries that broke when the data changed. Fixes that had to be repeated again and again. Then he hit Module 7 of Automate with Power Query. That’s where it clicked. Not just how to use Power Query, but how to tame it. How to read the M code, spot the troublemakers, and set up queries that adapt. Now? No more manual patch jobs. No more fearing data refreshes. The pitfall and automation of the course was something that I was looking forward to, and of course it did not disappoint. I always had to manually correct my pitfalls and they occurred often, but now it can be corrected automatically. Also, I always had to check for updates but now it is automated. Thanks, Leila, and your super team at XelPlus.
Mariano Arruda, Aerospace Engineering Officer
👏 Big win, Mariano! 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 😇 Let’s build a library of wins! 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.
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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...