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.
This stops the filter chaos
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Shared Excel files are great until your whole team needs to work on it at once. You filter for your tasks. Your colleague filters for theirs. Now your filter's gone. You filter again. They filter again. ๐ค It's like fighting over the TV remote, except it's a spreadsheet so more annoying. The fix: Sheet View. Go to View tab > Sheet View > New. You'll notice the column and row headers change to black. Give it a name. This way you can reuse it later. Just type over the "Temporary View". Now filter and sort however you want. Everyone else sees their own view. No more filter wars. When you're done, just Exit or go back to Default view. Next time you open the file, select your view from the dropdown and all your filters apply instantly. You can create multiple views this way, to tackle data from many directions. It's a lifesaver when working on shared task lists or project trackers. But fair warning: it can be buggy. 8 times out of 10 it works great, but I also had it override the default view on exit. ๐คจ Speaking of learning new tricks, mark your calendar for March 14th: โ Global Excel Summit Community DayโGlobal Excel Summit Community Day is back. Completely online. Completely FREE. It's a day when the Excel community comes together You can expect:
It runs from 9 am to 8 pm GMT on March 14th. Jump in for an hour or stay all day. Zero cost. Just register (seats limited). If you've been putting off learning something new because courses are expensive or you're not sure where to start, this removes every excuse. This is your chance to get inspired.
โ ๐ค Geeky News๐ป Windows pulls back on AIMicrosoft admitted Windows 11 went off track in 2025. Too many bugs. Too much AI shoved into places it didn't belong. Now they're hitting the brakes. They're cutting back Copilot in built-in apps like Notepad and Paint. Some features might get removed entirely. Others might lose the Copilot branding. The shift happened after users made it clear they weren't happy. When the Windows president posted about turning Windows into an "agentic OS" in November, thousands of negative replies forced him to turn off comments. Microsoft's now focusing on what should have mattered all along: making Windows stable, fast, and reliable. The AI retreat isn't just happening at Microsoft. ๐ฆ Firefox gives you the kill switchFirefox just added an AI controls page in their Nightly (preview) version. You can toggle individual AI features or use the "Block AI enhancements" option to shut everything off at once. It covers page translations, PDF text generation, AI tab grouping, link previews, and sidebar chatbots. Mozilla says they're giving people control. But these features are still opt-out, not opt-in. And the settings page is arriving months after the features rolled out. Firefox is also testing split-screen mode and tab notes. Split-screen lets you open two pages side by side in the same window. Tab notes let you add reminders to specific tabs. Meanwhile, Google's going the opposite direction. ๐ Google doubles down on AI searchGoogle AI Overviews now lets you ask follow-up questions. Click "Show more" and a chat box appears at the bottom where you can keep asking. They're also upgrading to their Gemini 3 model for better responses. The catch? Data shows 26% of users stop browsing at the AI Overview. That's up from 16% with traditional search results. That's 26% of people trusting AI without checking the sources. ๐ โ ๐ค Did You Know?The fastest way to apply a filter to your Excel range: Ctrl + Shift + L It's a toggle. Ctrl + Shift + L to apply a filter. Ctrl + Shift + L to remove it (and unfilter the data in the process). If your mouse needs a break, open the filter menu with Alt + Down arrow. Move around with arrow keys. Check and uncheck filter options with Space. โ ๐ Forever? Literally took just minutesCongratulations to Matt on completing Python in Excel for the Real World! Matt's a Connections Planning Engineer who'd been trying to wrap his head around Python in Excel since it launched. Powerful tool, but overwhelming. Random videos only helped a little. Then this: It's amazing to see him already building solutions that work and save him time & effort. That's the beauty of Python in Excel - it fills the gaps that this (already powerful) tool had. And when you can achieve something faster or easier, why wouldn't you? Have a great week ahead, Leila โ 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.
The files I used to have in my corporate job were pretty large. Like 40+ sheets. Some had more. I used to dread opening one of these during a presentation. Someone would ask me to pull up a specific sheet. And I'd be scrolling... checking... scrolling... It wasn't fun. Then someone showed me a simple click to see all the tabs in one place. I'd been using Excel for 10 years by that time and had NO CLUE this existed. That's just one of 4 methods I cover in this week's video, including one that...
Your Power Query file works perfectly. On your machine. Then someone else tries to use it and suddenly nothing refreshes because the folder path points to your laptop. This is why people move files to SharePoint. Same folder, everyone can access it, no more path issues. Great. You'll just use the SharePoint Folder connector and... ๐ต๐ซ Ok, which path it's supposed to be? Here's the catch: Power Query shows you a giant list of URLs instead of folders. Well, there is a better way. And it takes...
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...