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.
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. ๐ Watch this 50 second videoโ ๐ค Geeky News๐ 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... ๐ Google Meet now screenshots slides for youโ"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. ๐ค 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. ๐ 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: ๐ Join 500,000+ 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.
I once typed a rate straight into a formula instead of referencing the cell. Just to test something. Then I forgot about it. That's the thing about hard-coded numbers. Some hide better than others. The ones typed directly into a cell get caught fast: Find & Select, Go To Special, done. A number typed straight into a formula is the one that causes real trouble. It won't update when everything else does, so your totals drift and you have no idea why. Go To Special can't see it, and Show...
Printing an Excel sheet should be a two-second job. Ctrl+P, hit print, done. You expect 2 pages. You get 20. And you have no clue what you're looking at, because the headers are missing. The chart's cut in half. So you try to shrink it to fit. Now you need a magnifying glass to read anything. And yes, this happens with PDFs too. "Print to PDF" doesn't save you from any of it. It just makes the mess portable. I remember the first time I bothered to actually find the settings (yep, it took a...
Here's what I've noticed. The reports that look the cleanest in a meeting are almost always the hardest to work with. Here's an example of a meeting-friendly table: But wait until you need to create a Pivot Table or do quarterly or half-year analysis. Then it's better to have the data in long format: But how do you quickly turn wide into long? ๐ Here's the 1 minute formula video Power Query is an option for sure. A few clicks and you're done. But if your numbers are already in the sheet,...