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.
Where merged cells actually belong
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You’ve probably seen the warnings (including from me): “Never use merged cells!” Is merging cells always bad? Like many things in Excel, the answer isn’t so black and white. There are situations where merging cells makes sense. And others where it completely wrecks your spreadsheet’s functionality. Here’s the simple rule I follow: ✔️ Top of the sheet for clean headers? Merge all you want. ❌ Middle of your data table? Absolutely not. (You can get the same effect with a smarter method... read on) 👉 In this blog post, I walk you through when it’s okay, how to clean up merges gone wrong, and the better alternatives to use in data-heavy areas (Center Across Selection to the rescue). 🤓 Geeky News✂️ More precise recording with the Snipping ToolThe Snipping Tool is testing the option to screen record a specific window. Currently, you need to hand-select the area to record, which can be tricky - you either include too much or too little. Soon, you'll select the window and record exactly what you need. ⚖️ LibreOffice Calc gets new functionsYou know I'm a ride-or-die Excel geek, but sometimes you have to check in with the competition 😉 Calc, the spreadsheet app in the open source office suite LibreOffice, just got 14 new functions! These include functions like VSTACK, TEXTSPLIT, CHOOSECOLS, WRAPROWS, TAKE, etc. Here, you can learn about their Excel counterparts. It makes the two programs more compatible, which is excellent news if you're an Excel person sharing files with the Calc crowd (or vice versa). 🌈 Google's AI improves privacyThe Gemini app introduced two new features with privacy in mind: Temporary Chats is like incognito mode for Gemini. They're available for 72 hours (in case you have a follow-up) and then disappear. You can ask all the weird questions you want and not worry the bot will remember. Keep Activity is a toggle that you can disable if you don't want your data used to train the AI model. 🤔 Did You Know?You know there is a way to autofit your rows and columns FAST? Don't do it one by one. Pfft. No one has time for that 🙃 👉 Select all and only then double-click to autofit. 📽️ Check out the mouse and keyboard shortcuts here. 👏 When the busywork is gone...The truth is, the work can feel endless. Same steps. Same clicks. Same routine. Marconi felt it too. Then he automated one process. Just one. And suddenly... space. Breathing room. Enough to remember he could grow again. That’s the gift of automation: a little bit of yourself back. And that's what a course like Automate with Power Query is designed for. This course walks you through real business cases. You won’t just learn the tool. You’ll start seeing new ways of working you never imagined. What’s one process you could take off your plate this week? Best, Leila Want more?▶️ Subscribe on YouTube 🖇️ Follow us on LinkedIn 🥇 Join 400,000+ students in our courses 📣 Want to sponsor Between the Sheets? Get in touch here. 📨 If you were forwarded this message, you can get the free weekly email here. This newsletter contains affiliate links, which give us a small commission on any purchase made at no cost to you. This helps us run Between the Sheets and bring you updates like this. 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.
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....
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. 🫨 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. 👉 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, there’s a drag-and-drop option built...