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.
When did you last use TOCOL?
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When was the last time you used TOCOL in Excel? If the answer is never, I'd say you're in good company. The function's been in Excel for a while now but almost no one reaches for it. It can be super helpful though for everyday problems. For example, you've got people working across several projects, each project in its own column. Some names show up twice, some three times. Someone needs one clean list of everyone involved. Most people copy, paste, copy, paste, then remove duplicates and sort. But if you want it super fast AND dynamic, you'll use TOCOL. 🤓 Geeky News📎 Office 2016 and 2019 are both "dead"... for some peopleMicrosoft ended support for Office 2016 and Office 2019 back in October 2025. Except it's been quietly patching both ever since, 36 patches for 2016, 10 for 2019, right through July 2026. The catch: it's mostly volume-license and business customers getting the fixes. Retail buyers who bought a one-off copy of Home & Student or Professional have gotten nothing since the cutoff. If you're not sure which version you're on, you can check it under File > Account > Product Information. It might be time for an upgrade to Microsoft 365. Besides the security gap, you're also missing out on the newer functions like TOCOL, SORT, and UNIQUE... 🌈 Google Meet now screenshots slides for you"Take notes for me" in Google Meet can now grab screenshots of whatever's presented and drop them right into the meeting notes, so you're not limited just to the transcript. Useful when the presenter refers to "that chart" three times and never says what's on it. Rolling out now to paid Google Workspace accounts. 🤖 Claude now watermarks what it writesAnthropic just announced that newer Claude models embed an invisible watermark into generated text, plus signed metadata into generated files, to comply with the EU's AI transparency rules. You won't see it, and it won't change the output. But it travels with the text if you copy-paste it elsewhere. Detection tools for spotting these marks are coming, but not out yet. 👏 Turning data into decisionsKofoworola is a project manager. She recently finished Fast Track to Power BI and posted this on LinkedIn: Congrats, Kofoworola. I totally relate to arguing over whose spreadsheet is right and what calculations they used. Good to see a project manager go fix it at the source. See you next week, Leila When you're ready, here are some ways we can help: 🎓 Join 500,000+ members in our courses 📺 Get free tutorials on YouTube 👥 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. 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.
I got an interesting comment on my Copilot course announcement. And I think the person who left it has a point. He’d been following me for a while, and said my videos inspired him to look beyond Excel, into Power Query and eventually Power BI. But now he was worried that creators like me were encouraging people to stay underskilled. His point was simple: If AI can do the work for you, why bother learning how to do it yourself? And I get it. Because I used to worry about the same thing. When...
Quick thing before we start. I'm working on a new course on Copilot for Microsoft 365, and it pre-launches in November. Claude and ChatGPT have been my go-to tools for a while, and I used them for pretty much everything. But Copilot has improved a lot in recent months, and with the new capabilities I can finally see how crazy helpful it is for anyone who works with data and has all the Microsoft apps at work anyway. If you'd like to be one of the first in, I'd love to have you on the interest...
For years, people have been asking Microsoft for one very basic thing back: let us put the taskbar where we want it. Windows 10 did this just fine. Top, side, bottom - your call. Then Windows 11 arrived and decided: Nope. Bottom only. Well... it's finally back. You can now move the taskbar to the top, left, or right, and Windows actually rearranges itself around it. Personally, I wouldn’t sacrifice horizontal space on a smaller laptop. But on a big monitor I do go sideways. In this week's...