XelPlus is a leading online education company, providing training courses for Excel, Power BI, Finance, and Google Sheets. XelPlusโ bestselling courses are popular among financial analysts, CFOโs, and business owners. Technology is changing fast. We help our members turn confusion into confidence with every skill learnt.
Your target, solved backwards
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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 much with your boss watching. Or if you're short on time. Goal Seek does this for you. Tell it the result you want, and it finds the input that gets you there. Even when that output depends on more than one calculation, which you've probably run into before. ๐ Here's how to set it upโ ๐ค Geeky News๐ Windows Search is getting less pushyMicrosoft is reworking the Windows Search Box. Apps, files, and settings are now prioritized over web and Store suggestions when they're the stronger match. You can even toggle web and Store suggestions off entirely if you just want your own stuff. The results get clear labels (app, file, setting, or web). It's also more forgiving with typos, and apparently less likely to crash. Rolling out to Insiders in the Experimental channel. ๐ฌ Copilot in Microsoft Forms gets a real chat paneโCopilot in Forms now works like it does in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. A proper chat pane, grounded to your form, instead of just a refinement bar. It can review your form for gaps or conflicting settings, bulk-edit questions, apply branching logic, and dig into your responses for you, follow-up questions included. Rolling out now to Microsoft 365 commercial Copilot users. Consumer Copilot subscribers keep the older version for now. ๐ Google Sheets now imports 3D bar charts properlyGoogle Sheets used to flatten 3D bar charts into 2D when you imported a file. Not anymore. Import one from Excel or elsewhere, and it stays 3D. Question is: why. 3D charts shouldn't exist in the first place. The extra dimension distorts the proportions and can flat out mislead whoever's reading it. I hope you already know better than to use them. So no, Google. Supporting them properly isn't the flex you think it is. ๐ ๐ A matter of minutesElisabeth works as a Fiscal Analyst for a nonprofit. She knows the feeling of a boss asking for something out of nowhere. She completed Fundamentals of Financial Analysis, so she was ready: Congrats, Elisabeth. Nice when a random ask turns out to be no big deal. Microsoft MVP for another yearJuly is the month for Microsoft MVP renewals. Many thanks to Microsoft for recognizing me as MVP for another year. I can't believe it's 10 times already! Time really does fly. Many thanks to you for watching my tutorials, commenting and sharing your feedback. Our graphic designer is away this month, so I created this image using Microsoft Designer. The last time I used Designer was 6 months ago and it drove me nuts. See you next week, Leila When you're ready, here are some ways we can help: ๐ Join 400,000+ members in our coursesโ ๐บ Get free tutorials on YouTubeโ ๐ฅ 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. XelPlusโ bestselling courses are popular among financial analysts, CFOโs, 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...