Hey there,

I’m back from my holiday in Dubai - it was lovely to get time away from the screen.

And the Dubai Museum of Illusions actually taught me something about Excel. 🤔

See, the Museum is full of mind-bending optical illusions that play tricks on your eyes. I had to measure these lines with my own hands, for example, to believe they’re the same size:

And this reminded me of learning Excel just from watching videos.

When you’re watching someone else, it’s easy to think that you’ve absorbed all the necessary information. But until you try it yourself, with your own two hands, you never really know.

When I first learned Power Query, I watched a lot of videos, and it all seemed simple. Click, click, click - everything works. But when I got started, I didn’t even know where to click to open the Power Query editor!

So here’s my advice.

Whenever you’re learning from videos, make time to directly apply your knowledge. Don’t trust your eyes to do all the learning!

That’s why all my courses come with downloadable work files. That way you can practice and complete tasks by yourself, and get some real hands-on-experience. 😊

🎬 Automatically Move Completed Tasks to an Archive​

Many of us have to keep task or to-do lists in Excel. Wouldn’t it be nice if tasks marked as “Complete” or “Done” are moved to an Archive automatically at the end of each day? Then, only open tasks would be on your list each morning.

​Well in this tutorial I’ll show you exactly how to do that, using Office Scripts & Power Automate!

Personally, I still find writing VBA a lot easier. But the advantage of Office Scripts is that your macro works in the browser as well. So if you open Excel online or work with Excel inside Teams, your automation will work - whereas VBA will not.

Of course, Office Scripts is still new and has some limitations. But I think it'll improve a lot in the future.

🎨 Easiest Way to Edit Visuals in Power BI​

I recently talked about how PowerBI is getting an Excel-like update to its visual formatting... Well now you can see for yourself, because I’ve made a whole video to walk you through the changes! As I was testing this, I came across some hidden features, which I share in the video.

🤓 Geeky News

📒 OneNote - Arrange Tabs Vertically​
​OneNote just got a much-awaited feature - you can now arrange your tabs vertically! Just go to View > Tabs Layout > Vertical Tabs. This change brings the desktop version of OneNote in line with the web versions. Here’s my short video comparing OneNote’s vertical and horizontal tab options.

👩‍💻 Edge - Stay Focused with New Workspaces
This new Edge feature lets you create dedicated spaces in your browser for different projects or events. Each workspace has its own name, set of tabs and favorites – I think of these workspaces as ‘supertabs’. You can share whole workspace views with other people.

👩‍💻 Edge - AI Image Creator​
​Edge has a new integrated AI Image generator tool (based on DALL-E). Just click on the + in the Edge sidebar to toggle it on. At least, that’s what Microsoft say – I don’t see this option in my version yet!

👩‍💻 Edge - Drop Feature
The new Drop feature in lets you send images, videos, and notes to yourself via the Edge browser. That content is backed up on OneDrive, and accessible across all devices. You can also edit images in the browser (including cropping, color adjustments, and adding filters). In many ways, it's similar to Apple’s Airdrop feature.

✅ To Do - ‘My Day’ View Update
A big update for the Microsoft To Do app! Any tasks due ‘today’ will be automatically added to the new ‘My Day’ view. You can also add more tasks to that view by right-clicking and selecting “Add to My Day”.

📊 Excel - Return of the ​QAT (Currently Office Insider only)
Microsoft hid the Quick Access Toolbar as part of their Microsoft 365 visual refresh, and moved the Undo and Redo commands to the Home tab. But now, due to popular demand, the QAT is shown by default - including the Undo, Redo, and Save commands! AutoSave is also back on the title bar. For now, this update only applies to Office Insider.

💚 My Favorite Things

🎬 YouTube Video - Why AI art struggles with hands​
Why does AI struggle to generate non-freaky images of human hands - even though it can create photo-realistic faces? Another great video from Vox.

🚀 Power Stories

Thank you to Rahul for this great feedback on LinkedIn! And congratulations on completing our Master Excel Power Pivot & DAX (Beginner to Pro) course. 🥳

Got a success story about using your XelPlus skills? I’d love to hear it! Hit reply to share the details, and inspire other students 😇

See you next week,

Leila

Want more?

▶️ Subscribe on YouTube​

🖇️ Follow me on LinkedIn​

🥇 Join 300,000+ people in our courses​

📣 Want to sponsor XelPlus Weekly? Get in touch 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 XelPlus Weekly and bring you updates like this. Thank you for your support!