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.
When I worked in finance, the reports I had to build almost always came from more than one sheet. A lot of copy-pasting. These days one formula can do that for you. It's called VSTACK. It stacks your sheets into one list. It stays live, works in Excel Online, and anyone who opens the file knows exactly what's happening. Most people who use VSTACK, use it to glue two ranges together, and think that's it. But that's barely scratching the surface. I put together my top 6 VSTACK tips in this new...
The most common way people mess up their own spreadsheets is a button sitting right there on the Home tab. Merge & Center. It's one of the first buttons anyone learns in Excel, and it does exactly what it says: centers a title, makes a header look tidy. The trouble starts the moment someone uses it inside the data instead of just the header row. Try to sort... yep, it doesn't work. Try to sum a column with a merged cell sitting in the middle of it. Column E, for example: Exactly. You'd have...
What do you do when your data goes wide? Picture a sales table with one row per rep, but then Sales_Jan, Units_Jan, Sales_Feb, Units_Feb, and so on, all the way to December. It just keeps growing wider with every month you add. Try to filter by month, or build a pivot table around it, and you're stuck. Month isn't a value in this table. It's baked into the column headers. You need a way to turn the wide into long so that it's ready for analysis. And there's a Python function that does exactly...