Mastermind Plotting (For Good!) and AI Excel Tutors

What I've been up to

I was dogsitting elsewhere for the past week and a half, so I wasn't able to record book 5 during that time, but I at least got through chapter 7 before I left!

Also, fun fact: My recording setup and mic settings are surprisingly good at blocking out most noises. But dog barks are one of the few things that register on my microphone no matter what, no matter where the dog is in the house. The truck roaring down the road? Not a problem. Someone going up and down our squeaky stairs? Generally fine. But Lily's barking? The mic picks it up every time. So every time we get a delivery or someone even goes near our house, I have to pause the recording until Lily is done fiercely defending us. 😅

At least she's past the phase where she would burst into the room to see who I was "talking to." Now she's used to my crazy muttering to myself.

Tips and tools

I took advantage of the time away from home to do a deep dive on my business. Spreadsheets, trainings, journaling, pacing in circles in the living room for half-hours at a time (I like getting my exercise and thinking in at the same time, OK?), the works.

And I found out that Gemini is astonishingly good at teaching you about Excel. (Skip to the end for the TL;DR if your eyes are now glazing over with horror.)

While I was creating a spreadsheet to track my subscriptions (a surprisingly daunting task, considering how I somehow managed to rope myself into four different payment schedules, and no template I could find would show me what I would pay for the next three months, let alone each month for the next year), I expected to spend hours Googling and piecing together the formulas I needed, as had been the case most times I'd needed to wrestle a spreadsheet together in the pre-AI days.

Instead, all I had to do was come up with a framework that might work ("All I need is to pull this number from this cell and this number from this cell and add them together if the dates in the adjacent cells fall within this month..."), then tell Gemini what I wanted the formula for a single cell to do and what cells to pull from, and it would come up with it for me, and all I had to do was copy and paste the formula into the cell. It was even eerily good at troubleshooting what I'd gotten wrong when I pasted the same formula elsewhere and thus broke something.

And if I wanted a shortcut to do something? Instead of Googling and sifting for half an hour through the results, I just explained what shortcut I wanted, and Gemini just told me and gave me step-by-step instructions.

So, if you've ever wanted to paste a format or formula to all cells to the right of your current one but not the ones to the left...

1. Select the cell,

2. Press Ctrl + Shift + right arrow

3. When all the cells are selected (which will be a ridiculous number, considering spreadsheets seem to go on to near infinity)...

4. Press Ctrl + R.

   
   

And voilà! The format/formula will be copied to all cells in that row. I have always wanted to know how to do that. (Yes, I know I'm a nerd.)

I consider myself as technologically competent as the average millennial, but even I didn't know that I could create a spreadsheet that advanced without having an accounting degree or spending hours of frustrated Googling. And here, an Excel tutor was waiting for me all along (or, at least, for the past couple years). Practically every answer I could have wanted was available to me in seconds.

Maybe I'm just getting on the AI-assistant bandwagon late, and you all already know this, but...suddenly, a world has opened up to me.

TL;DR

Is there something technology-wise that you know could really benefit you, that if only you had some nice, techy person just sit with you to walk you through it step by step in simple, friendly language (and if they ever slipped into a term you didn't know, they were happy to clarify)—if you had that kind of person helping you, you know you could do it? But you've never tried, because who would do that for you? Who would be so incredibly patient, they didn't care how many times you asked them to explain the same thing or help you each time you got it wrong? So you just shrugged it off as being out of your reach.

Well, next time that idea pops into your head, don't dismiss it immediately. Pull up Gemini, or ChatGPT, or whatever AI chat assistant is your preference and ask it to walk you through it.

You might be surprised what suddenly becomes possible for you.

(Ha, just don't expect it to be able to make a full, powerful Excel document all for you. Found out the hard way that ChatGPT can't do that yet, despite what it kept claiming. If it sends you down a rabbit hole for hours about "Ooo, but what if I added this, and this, and this," don't believe it can do it. It can't. Not yet, anyway.)