💥 Introducing XelPlus Weekly

This newsletter is getting a makeover for 2023!

From now on it’ll be called XelPlus Weekly. I’ll write to you every Sunday with:

📈 A useful tip or trick to boost your Excel / Office skills

💚 Some of my favorite things that week

📮 Exciting insider news and updates from Microsoft.

Let’s get started.

🤖 Excel’s Built-In A.I.

Did you know that Excel has a built-in AI tool?

It’s called Analyze Data, and it sits right in the Home tab (which gives you an idea of how important it is – the Home tab is prime real estate).

Here’s how it works.

Let’s say you’re tracking all of your company’s sales in an Excel workbook. You probably want to analyze that data for trends and insights (average amount of sales made to each customer, which region had the highest sales).

Well, instead of manually building a PivotTable or PivotChart… just click Analyze Data.

Excel’s AI will analyze all of your data for you, and present you with a list of the pivot tables and charts it thinks are most useful.

It’s like having a smart, lightning-quick assistant, ready to go.

Found a table or chart that you like? Click Insert PivotTable/PivotChart to include it in your workbook.

This is perfect for uncovering new business insights, and quickly creating impressive presentations.

But it gets even better.

Microsoft also lets you ask for specific insights using Natural Language Processing. So you can talk to the AI just like you would to a co-worker:

• “Which region had the least sales?”
• “How many sales for Customer ID 8020?”
• “What customer name sold the highest quantity of laptop bag black?”

I love this feature.

And with the success of OpenAI’s GPT-3 and ChatGPT, I expect Microsoft to roll out a lot more AI features over the next couple of years.

For more info on how ChatGPT solves Excel problems, read on…

💚 This Week’s Favorites

🎬 YouTube Video - Can A.I. with ChatGPT Properly Solve Your Spreadsheet Problems? I asked ChatGPT to solve several complex Excel spreadsheet problems… and so far it’s really good! It got 70-80% of the questions right.

So it’s a very useful tool. But you still need to understand Excel, because you’ll need to correct the AI’s mistakes. For example, ChatGPT gets the order wrong for some IF functions and it couldn’t figure out some of the newer formula combinations. But it did successfully write a VBA macro!

As you can tell from my face in the thumbnail below, I’m impressed 😆

🐦 Tweet - Microsoft CEO on Excel in 1993. I came across this talk by Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. It’s amazing how back in 1993, importing data into Excel from other databases sounded like it could only be done by an IT genius… And now 20 years later it's just three clicks. (Excel → Get Data → select the database you need).

Brandon Arvanaghi 🐱 @arvanaghi In 1993, he was a middle manager at Microsoft giving Excel demos. 22 years later, he became the CEO. Satya Nadella on the view from the top: pic.twitter.com/MwCgdXMzCE December 26th 2022 91 Retweets 809 Likes

🇦🇹 Experience - VR Time Travel in Vienna. I had a cool experience this week. The Time Travel company uses a ‘5D cinema’ with moving seats and VR goggles to take you on a virtual tour of Vienna during different time periods, like the Habsburg Empire. If you ever visit Austria, put this on your to-do list!

🤓 Geeky News

📊 Excel - Formula Suggestions After you type the “=” sign in a cell or the formula bar, Excel will auto-suggest the best formula based on contextual insights from your data. Formulas that can be suggested are SUM, AVERAGE, COUNT, COUNTA, MIN, and MAX. (They’re still rolling out this feature for Excel for web users, but it’ll hopefully come to Desktop soon.)

📊 Excel - Formula by Example. If you’re performing manual and repetitive data entry in a column, Excel will now suggest to fill the entire column with a formula if it identifies a pattern. This is like Flash Fill, but instead of just static values, Excel can now suggest formulas. (Another AI feature that’s only available in Excel for the web for now.)

📧 Outlook – Outlook Lite App. Microsoft have launched this new Outlook app for low-resource phones. It has most of the benefits of it’s bigger brother, but is less performance-intensive. I think that Microsoft are targeting markets and countries where there are a lot of light-weight mobile devices (with low storage & RAM), and often slower networks.

🚀 Power Stories

Amazing feedback from Chris, who took my Fast Track to Power BI course! The dashboards he built for his team were a massive win. 🥳

See you next week!

Leila

PS Do you have any Excel or Office Tips I could share with 65,000 other friendly readers? Let me know by replying to this email.

And if you’d like to sponsor the next issue of XelPlus Weekly, get in touch here.

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