XelPlus is a leading online education company, providing training courses for Excel, Power BI, Finance, and Google Sheets. XelPlusβ bestselling courses are popular among financial analysts, CFOβs, and business owners. Technology is changing fast. We help our members turn confusion into confidence with every skill learnt.
The mismatch you always miss
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You know that feeling when you're staring at two lists in Excel, trying to spot what's missing? Maybe a product catalog. A list of invoices versus payments. Or a guest list like the below: Whatever it is... checking which one is on the first list but not on the second is.... very slow. And you will miss something. There's a faster way. One conditional formatting rule, and Excel flags every mismatch for you. The second something changes, the highlighting updates too. About a minute to watch. Could save you hours π Watch: Spot the difference between two lists instantlyβ π€ Geeky NewsβοΈ Copilot in Excel is changingUntil now, Copilot only worked in Excel, if the file was saved to OneDrive or SharePoint. Now you can also use it in local files. Handy if you work offline or just like keeping files on your machine. But that's not the only change. App Skills - the "doing" part of Copilot in Excel - is being retired and replaced with Agent Mode (now also available in the EU). Anything that requires direct edits - formatting, charts, multi-step tasks - will go through Agent Mode. Copilot Chat still handles questions and data exploration. One thing not yet carried over: the Python in Excel and advanced text analysis that App Skills supported. Microsoft says it's coming but gives no timeline. π€¨ π Power BI: type what you're looking forThe Input Slicer (previously called Text Slicer) is now generally available. It lets you filter report data by typing instead of clicking through predefined categories. You can also paste a list of values straight into the slicer. In fact, this works for all slicer types now. Copy from Excel or Notepad, paste in, and it applies all matching selections at once. BTW, preview visuals in the visualization pane are now labeled "(Preview)" so it's always clear what's production-ready and what isn't. All these updates (and more) available in the February 2026 release of Power BI. π Two new functions in Google SheetsGoogle Sheets just added =SHEET() and =SHEETS(). SHEET() returns the position number of a sheet. SHEETS() returns the total count of sheets in the file. Both update automatically when you add, delete, move, or rename a tab. Handy when you're building something that depends on spreadsheet structure. They might be familiar to Excel users. Only Excel's =SHEETS() doesn't recalculate automatically. Rolling out gradually from February 23rd. π¦ The part they edit outEver wondered what actually goes into making a video course? I just shared a little behind-the-scenes from my recent trip to California. π Here's what I got up toβ π Bridging the gapJens, a controlling team lead, makes a great point about expanding horizons. If you think Python is just for programmers, you're missing out. It opens up so many new avenues for analysis. Charts not available in Excel. Machine learning. Forecasting models. And if you can write an Excel formula, you can write a Python function. Congrats to Jens on completing Python in Excel for the Real World and exploring the new horizons! See you next week, Leila When you're ready, here are some ways we can help: π Join 400,000+ members in our coursesβ πΊ Get free tutorials on YouTubeβ π₯ 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. XelPlusβ bestselling courses are popular among financial analysts, CFOβs, and business owners. Technology is changing fast. We help our members turn confusion into confidence with every skill learnt.
Pie charts get a bad rep. And honestly? Fair. I'm not a total hater. Two or three slices and a pie chart can tell a perfectly good story. But here's what actually happens in that meeting room when you've got 8+ slices on screen. People glance at the legend, look back at the chart... and have absolutely no idea what they're looking at. They won't say that, of course. Instead, the room either moves on a little too quickly or starts asking questions the chart should have already answered. Either...
Uh-oh. Embarrassing typo in the file name. And there's 50 of them. 𫨠Individual contracts about to go out to clients. You could rename them one by one. Or you could fix the whole mess in five seconds using something already built into Windows. No downloads.No complicated setup. Just PowerShell. π I show you exactly how here. (BTW, if PowerShell doesn't pop up after typing the name in Explorer, try powershell.exe.) And if typing commands makes you nervous, thereβs a drag-and-drop option built...
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. π€ 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...