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.
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We’re going off-script this week. You asked. I answered. Questions ranged from my honest thoughts on Copilot, VBA, ASMR voices (?), whether AI is coming for our Excel jobs... 31 questions. As fast as I could answer. It's all in this video: Also, a big Thank You if you're subscribed to my channel. Our community is approaching 3 million on YouTube which is crazy! 🤓 Geeky News📅 Office 2016/2019 support ends next weekOctober 14 marks the end of support for Office 2016 and 2019. That means no more security updates or bug fixes. Hopefully your organization's already sorted. If you're only now making the move to Microsoft 365, brace yourselves for a world of difference. In a good way! Dynamic arrays, new functions like XLOOKUP or GROUPBY, Python in Excel are so worth it. 📲 Microsoft 365 refreshes app logosSoon you'll be welcomed by a new set of Office icons. Every few years, Microsoft likes to tweak the design of its product logos. The time has come for another redesign, this time going for "softer, fluid forms". What do you think? Personally, I finally got used to the current set and I would have been happy to stay with it for a few more years. 🤖 AI agents arrive in TeamsMicrosoft just rolled out AI agents across Teams to handle the stuff that derails meetings and buries decisions in chat threads. Facilitator Agent joins meetings to track agendas, take notes, capture tasks, and answer questions in real-time. Channel Agent becomes the expert for each channel. It can draft status reports, answer questions, and manage tasks from your conversations and meetings. Workflows now come with AI templates, letting you automate morning briefings, weekly reports - basically anything you want scheduled - with zero coding. And let's be real - nobody watches meeting recordings. But if you're into your podcasts, perhaps you can listen to an audio recap on your commute. All available now in public preview for Microsoft 365 Copilot users. 🕵️♀️ ChatGPT caught in a data heistNew technologies come with new risks. Security researchers just proved AI agents can turn on you. They tricked ChatGPT's Deep Research into swiping sensitive data from Gmail. Think HR emails, personal details - everything. They planted hidden instructions in an email - a so-called prompt injection. When the user asked the AI agent to do research, it followed the attacker's commands instead. The exploit ran on OpenAI's cloud, invisible to standard security defenses. OpenAI patched it, but the same technique could work on Outlook, Google Drive, and Dropbox. AI agents that can act on your behalf are powerful timesavers. They're also new attack surfaces. As we hand over more access, the risks evolve too. 👏 From "never used it" to "can't live without it"If you’re wondering whether learning Power Query can move the needle in your career, here’s what that looks like in real life. This is why I’ll never stop banging the drum on skills that actually move you forward. If you’ve been feeling stuck, this is your reminder: it’s not too late, and it’s not too complicated. You just need the right next step. See you next week, 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 chart exists. You made it. It's in this workbook somewhere. Sheet14? 16? Who named these sheets anyway? Excel has a Navigator for this. Most people still don't know it's there. View > Navigation. It opens a pane on the side with a list of all your tabs. You can easily jump between them. Expand any tab, and you'll see an overview of all the contents in the sheet. All your tables, pivot tables, charts, slicers, and any other objects, like shapes and pictures. Use the search box to...
We all want dashboards that look professional. But a dashboard that looks good and doesn't tell you much? That's more decoration. Your manager sees $2.3M in revenue displayed front and center. Okay. Now what? Is that good or bad? Better than last year? Did we hit target? Without context, that number means nothing. Power BI's new card visual (now generally available) lets you add that context right into your KPIs. Previous period comparisons. Target indicators. Professional design with...
You know the result you want. Excel just wants you to write the perfect formula to get there. And we both know that part can slow us down. Excel recently introduced Formula by Example, which generates a formula from a pattern you provide. This can be helpful. But Power Query has had such a feature for ages. Go to Add Column > Column From Examples. Provide the pattern based on values in other columns, and let it do its magic. And if you have the formula bar enabled (highly recommended), you...