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.
Your taskbar is allowed to move again
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For years, people have been asking Microsoft for one very basic thing back: let us put the taskbar where we want it. Windows 10 did this just fine. Top, side, bottom - your call. Then Windows 11 arrived and decided: Nope. Bottom only. Well... it's finally back. You can now move the taskbar to the top, left, or right, and Windows actually rearranges itself around it. Personally, I wouldn’t sacrifice horizontal space on a smaller laptop. But on a big monitor I do go sideways. In this week's video, I show you where you can make the change, what still feels unfinished and a few other Windows updates that are genuinely useful. 🤓 Geeky News✈️ Another Copilot revampMicrosoft is rebuilding Copilot into three modes: Home, Code, and Autopilot. Home is the new starting point. It merges Chat (quick questions, drafts, lookups) and Cowork (bigger tasks you delegate and get back finished, like a report) into one place. It's also where Office in Copilot lives, so you can ask it to draft a document, build a deck, or model a budget, and it creates a real, editable Word, Excel, or PowerPoint file. (We seem to have gone full circle back to the name Office, huh.) Code is the developer experience. Describe an app, tracker, or dashboard in plain language, and Copilot builds it for you. Autopilot serves as your digital coworker - give the agent a name and a goal. It keeps working on its own, checking threads, running recurring tasks, picking things back up days later. And hopefully not hacking other companies or governments, while it's at it... 👀 It's rolling out gradually through Microsoft's Frontier program over the next few weeks. 📆 Office 2021 stops getting updates on October 13If your company runs Office LTSC 2021 (the one-time-purchase version, not a Microsoft 365 subscription), support ends in just over a week. After that, no more security fixes, no more updates, and no technical support, even though the apps will keep running. If that's you, this is worth flagging to IT now rather than finding out the hard way later. 😬 What a pivot table actually does, in plain EnglishSomeone asks what a pivot table is. And people start saying things like: "Well, it dynamically summarizes and aggregates multidimensional data…" Which is usually the exact moment the other person's eyes glaze over. Now you can send them this video. Or steal my analogy, I don't mind 😉 🤔 Did You Know?Excel opens many features - like PivotTable Fields, Queries & Connections, Copilot - in a pane on the left. You can use the pane switcher to navigate between them. What if you want them side by side? You have the space to spare and you don't want to keep switching. Click on the down arrow and move out of tab. To bring the pane closer to the action, simply drag and drop. 👏 When your Excel skills get noticed by the bossStella shared this after completing Excel Pivot Table Mastery: Before the course, I understood bit of this and that, but now I totally understand the errors that I'd made in my daily work and won't repeat the same mistake. I enjoyed the course, and it is really very applicable in my daily work.
I've already received commendation from bosses for creating an interactive and dynamic dashboard!
- Stella Choo, Junior Data Executive
Congrats, Stella. Nothing beats a boss actually noticing the difference in your work, and a dashboard is about as visible as it gets. See you next week, Leila When you're ready, here are some ways we can help: 🎓 Join 500,000+ 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.
For 40 years, an Excel cell has held exactly one value. One number, one date, one piece of text. That's been the deal since before most of us opened our first spreadsheet. Of course, that never stopped us from cramming multiple things into a cell anyway, like team members separated by commas, several products, or project names. Then when it came to filtering or counting - we ran into trouble. This week, Microsoft changed that. You can now turn those comma-separated names into an actual list...
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...