Leila Gharani

I just realized I forgot to share the link to the Excel Essentials course that went live on LinkedIn Learning.

If you already have LinkedIn Learning, through Premium or through work, you already have access.

If you don't have LinkedIn Learning, here's the way in: click through to my LinkedIn post here: www.linkedin.com/posts/leilagharani_microsoftexcel…

...and you get full access free for 24 hours.

Use it when you can dedicate some time to go through it. Maybe some summer learning to brush up on your Excel skills. Lots of exercises and challenges in there. If you like it, I'd appreciate you sharing it with your colleagues.

1 week ago (edited) | [YT] | 578

Leila Gharani

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.
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The interface is intuitive so I was able to figure things out mostly on my own. It's improved a lot and you don't need additional AI credits for most things like you did before.
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I did have to use ChatGPT to figure out how to add other elements, like the MVP logo and the background. The Microsoft documentation online was outdated and the buttons were no longer there. You'd think you could drag and drop from Windows Explorer to add elements, but no. It's copy and paste.

Anyhow sometimes it's good to be curious and revisit the tools you dismissed before. Things are changing fast.

2 weeks ago | [YT] | 2,280

Leila Gharani

Let's say someone hands you a folder of CSV files. Different date formats. Some have extra header rows. One has columns in a different order.

Your job: combine them into one clean table.

Could you do it in Power Query without AI-ing/Googling anything?

If you hesitated, that's normal. Most people learn Power Query by following along. But following along and solving a problem cold are two different skills.

We put together 15 exercises like this. Real messy files. A goal. You solve it, then compare your approach to a video walkthrough. If you're interested, check it out:

👉 www.xelplus.com/course/power-query-challenge-pack/

Is there a Power Query problem that trips you up the most at work?

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1 month ago | [YT] | 827

Leila Gharani

Just got back from Global Excel Summit in London.
BTW that cape on the table isn't mine. I usually don't take it to conferences.

So much learned in the past few days - here are some of the highlights:

Victor Momoh tackled the thing most people are quietly avoiding, and walked through it step by step until it actually clicked. Yep. REGEX.

Ann K. Emery covered 40! visualization tips in 40 minutes. It was full of golden nuggets.

Damien Bird from Microsoft showed how Power Automate and Copilot Studio can work together. A smooth live demo right on stage. Which is harder than it looks.

Jakob Nielsen also from Microsoft showed us how we can build our own data types in Excel with the Data Types add-in. Since organization data types are retired from Excel, this is the best replacement.

Unpivot had an in person session on Power BI vs Excel. Real, funny, and honest about where each one actually wins.

And Mark Proctor proved Excel can play Taylor Swift songs. 🎸
That wasn't his only point. He also showed how Excel handles values in the backend, and how sometimes 1<>1 in Excel. Standup comedy meets the advanced stuff we thought we already knew.

I had the honor of opening the event. Talking about the topics that are my top interests right now. Python's data science libraries and how complex time series analysis is actually realistically possible in Excel. Unlike what some articles might claim.

The thread running through almost every session:
Excel isn't one tool anymore. It's a toolbox. And the toolbox keeps growing.

Ian Schnoor, put it well. Don't marry a single club. Every tool has strengths and weaknesses. The goal is finding the right fit for the situation and the person.

Danielle Stein Fairhurst and Cristiano Galvao both made the case that even as AI takes on more, the human in the chain still matters. And yes, we might get annoyed with AI for many reasons but how we interact and how we ask AI stuff, matters a lot.

Great to catch up with Oz du Soleil and many others I usually just see once a year. I met many members of our Python in Excel and Power Query courses. Thanks to everyone for stopping by and telling me a bit about your stories.

Huge thanks to Elena Lalovska, Tea Kuseva and the whole DATEL Productions Ltd. team for putting this together. And to Fay Bordbar and Giles Male for being such fun, easygoing hosts.

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2 months ago | [YT] | 833

Leila Gharani

One Excel formula. It returns the name of your most expensive campaign AND your cheapest campaign. Same cell. Same function.

No helper columns. No two separate formulas. Just one.

The function is called TAKE, and most people use it to grab the first or last few rows of a table. That's useful, but it's the basic version.

In this video, I show what happens when you combine TAKE with SORTBY, FILTER, and VSTACK.

You get rolling averages that update automatically, filtered top-5 lists, and cross-table comparisons pulled from multiple sheets.

3 months ago | [YT] | 121

Leila Gharani

There's a formula in this video that finds the immediate parent of any part in a Bill of Materials hierarchy. No helper columns. No VBA. Just one line.

It uses LOOKUP in a way I've never shown on this channel before. Our engineer showed me this approach, and it honestly caught me off guard.

The video also covers how to auto-indent BOM levels, strip messy PLM exports clean, and split part numbers from descriptions.

But that LOOKUP trick is the one people keep asking about.

3 months ago | [YT] | 73

Leila Gharani

There's a setting in Excel that auto-refreshes your Pivot Table every time you open the file. Most people have never turned it on.

That's one of 3 Pivot Table mistakes I cover in this video. The others:

- Using VLOOKUP to combine tables when Excel can link them for you
- Sticking with the default layout that makes reports look amateur (one-minute fix inside)

195,000+ people have watched it. If you work with Pivot Tables weekly, it's worth 9 minutes.

Which of the three are you guilty of?

3 months ago | [YT] | 138

Leila Gharani

Type "1000100" into an Excel formula and it knows your days off are Monday and Friday.

No VBA. No workaround.

Just a 7-character code that tells NETWORKDAYS.INTL exactly which days to skip.


Most people don't know this version of the function exists. They use the basic NETWORKDAYS, which is hardcoded to Saturday/Sunday.

If your team works a 4-day week, or your "weekend" falls on different days, that formula gives you wrong answers every time.


I break down how the code works (and how to add company holidays on top of it).

3 months ago | [YT] | 149

Leila Gharani

Every Monday, you open the same messy export. Delete the blank rows. Fix the headers. Copy it into your master sheet. Again.

That whole routine? Power Query does it in about 10 seconds. You set it up once. After that, you click Refresh and it's done.


In this video, I walk through three real scenarios: cleaning messy data, combining multiple files, and turning a cross-tab report into something a Pivot Table can actually use.


If you do any kind of recurring data cleanup, this will save you hours every month.

3 months ago | [YT] | 232