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.
The good thing about Excel is formulas update automatically. Change an input, the output adjusts. Ok. You know that. But what if you want the output to be a specific number. What should the input be? Let's say, your boss is standing right by your shoulder, staring at your spreadsheet. "We need to reach $2,500 in revenue this month. How many units do we need to sell?" You could keep tweaking the units cell until you get close. Guess, check, guess again. Pleasant enough if you're alone. Not so...
Most people open ChatGPT, drop in an Excel file, and type two words. Analyze this. What comes back looks good. The numbers, the insights, the tidy summary. But how do you actually know if it's right? Last week I put ChatGPT through a proper test. A messy, multi-sheet sales file with codes, lookups, and calculations it had to figure out on its own. Then I verified the results myself with a data model in Excel. There's a specific workflow that makes the difference between trusting AI blindly...
I always build my formulas the same way. I include extra rows below my data, just in case someone adds more next month. And every time, I get a column with zeros. A blank row that should be invisible suddenly shows up as zero in the spilled list. Annoying, but there are ways around it. My go-to was to wrap in a FILTER. Recently it got a lot simpler. One function. Or even better, one character. Add a dot before or after the colon in your range, like A2:.A100, and Excel quietly drops the blank...