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.
Excel has a memory. Most people never use it.
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Excel remembers things you teach it. That's not AI. It's a Custom List. And it's been hiding in Excel Options the whole time. That's how you get to automatically fill down months or days of the week. And you can build your own: team names, department codes, project phases - anything you type over and over. Excel learns the order too. So "Mon, Tue, Wed..." or your custom categories fill in automatically. The list lives on your device, not in the file. Set it up once. Use it in every workbook, forever. (Or at least, until you switch your laptop.) 🤓 Geeky News🗓️ Microsoft Planner got a glow-upPlanner is rolling out a cleaner interface, and task chat with @ mentions. You can now have threaded conversations directly inside a task, tag teammates, and get notified only when someone mentions you (not for every single comment, which was... a lot). There's also a new Goals view to connect tasks to actual priorities (this requires a Premium or Copilot license, though). Rolling out gradually, so you may not see it yet. 🔋 Windows 11 battery icons: now in colorMicrosoft is rolling out colorful battery icons to more devices. Green when charging, orange when energy saver kicks in, red below 6%. It only took two years of testing. You can also now show the battery percentage directly on the taskbar: Settings > System > Power & Battery. If you don't see it yet, try turning on "Get latest updates as soon as they're available" in Windows Update. 💻 Windows 11 now has a built-in Internet speed testRight-click your Wi-Fi icon in the taskbar and you'll see a new "Perform speed test" option. Fair warning: it opens Bing in your browser. So "built-in" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. It works though. You get ping, download and upload speed via Ookla's Speedtest. Part of an optional update, coming to everyone on Patch Tuesday, March 10th. 🤔 Did You Know?Custom Lists work for sorting too, not just filling. Go to Sort > Custom Sort, choose your Sort by column, and in Order, choose Custom List... Pick your list and confirm with OK. Now your data sorts in the order you defined. Not alphabetical. Not numerical. Yours. 🙌 One layer at a timeMy son inspired me to pick up the Rubik's cube and finally master the solve. So I made a tutorial. And Ana just reminded me why it was worth it. Progress happens one layer at a time. That's true for Rubik's cubes. It's true for Excel. It's true for pretty much everything worth getting good at. Are you ready to give it a go? See you next week, Leila When you're ready, here are some ways we can help: 🎓 Join 400,000+ members in our courses 📺 Get free tutorials on YouTube 👥 Train your whole team with our courses. Team pricing and progress tracking - reply for details. This newsletter contains affiliate links, which give us a small commission at no cost to you. 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...