Time-saving magic in 4 steps 🪄

Plus: the power of pausing

March 27, 2025

Hey! Ever found yourself at 6 PM on a Friday organizing messy data while everyone else in the office has already headed home? 🫠 

Enter: Excel Dashboards. They help turn messy, “what is going on here?!” data into clear and compelling visuals in minutes. The best part? They’re surprisingly easy to build! 

We’ve opened up new time slots for my free Excel Dashboards Class so you can learn how to build sleek, interactive dashboards that practically do the work for you—all in just one hour. 

Time-Saving Magic in 4 Steps 📸

POV: You’ve been working on a report all morning. 

It just needs a few ✨ finishing touches ✨ before you share it with your boss. But every time you update a number or change the formatting, you have to manually fix other charts that reference it. 🫠

There’s a better way: Excel’s Camera Tool lets you insert dynamic screenshots that update automatically every time you make a change.

To do this, you’ll need to add the Camera Tool to your Quick Access Toolbar. Here’s how! 

Step 1) Navigate to Quick Access Toolbar and select All Commands

Step 2) Scroll down until you see Camera. Add to list and select Save

Step 3) To use the camera tool, highlight the range of data you’d like to snap a picture of. Then, click on the Camera button

Step 4) Now, whenever you make changes to your data (such as changing the color of your cells), your screenshot will update automatically!

P.S. Dynamic screenshots work across different tabs in the same workbook. 😉

Build Powerful Interactive Dashboards ✨ 

This is one of your last chances to register for my free Excel Dashboards Class before it’s gone!

If you're ready to stop wasting time manually copy-pasting data and filtering columns, you’ll love my free Excel Dashboards Class. This isn’t your typical class—I weave storytelling and emotion into every lesson (yes, it’s possible for teaching Excel!) so you can actually remember and implement what you learn.

Don’t just take my word for it: This is just a snippet from a previous chat in one of my Excel dashboards classes!

Save your seat today—can’t wait to see you!

The Power of Pausing ⏸️

“Eat the frog? A fancy app? No—cold plunging!” 

A friend of mine was trying to guess one of my favorite productivity tools. The answer was…none of those. 😅 It’s space. More specifically: I create intentional pauses when I’m making important decisions. 

Same, Mindy, same

Why? Picture your brain as a background processor. When you feed it a problem, then step away, your mind quietly gets to processing. It's during this pause that your thoughts untangle themselves without being bogged down by stress and urgency.

Science calls this the incubation effect: when stepping away from a problem can lead to new insights. There are two types of incubation periods (and I’m a fan of both) ➜

  1. Mind-wandering (short incubation period). This is when your mind begins to drift about stuff unrelated to your task (for example, you start daydreaming while driving or washing the dishes). 

  2. Sleep (longer incubation period). This is when your brain organizes and processes information from the day while you catch ZZZs. (Fun fact: Chemist August Kekulé had an epiphany while dreaming that helped him uncover the structure of benzene!)

I use both in my professional life all the time! For example: 

  • For content ideas ➜ I’ll go on a walk to get the creative juices flowing (I got the idea to do a video on three dashboard formatting tips while out in nature 🌳). 

  • For big business decisions ➜ I’ll jot them down right before falling asleep—and often wake up knowing exactly what I want to do. 

Let this be your reminder that sometimes, the most productive thing you can do is…nothing at all. 🙇

Thanks for being here! Here’s some Thursday career motivation from author and neuroscientist Anne-Laure Le Cunff:

Stay Exceling,

Kat