Follow for a quick daily tech news recap: new AI tools, apps, gadgets and e-commerce updates, in plain words. We also help small shops with spreadsheets and Shopify product CSVs (link in bio).
Halloween spending is set to hit a record $13.5B, NRF says. Costumes $4.4B, decorations $4.3B, candy $4.1B. Top adult costume: witch. Top kids' costume: Spider-Man. 🎃 Follow for a daily tech and retail recap. (AI-assisted)
Is Taco Tuesday really your busiest day? Check first.
Next to each sale date, add =TEXT(A2,"ddd") for the day name. Pivot average sales by day, then chart it.
Use average, not total: some months have 5 Tuesdays.
Which day wins for you? #SmallBusiness (AI-assisted)
Netflix brought in $12.87 billion last quarter. Spread over 92 days, that's about $140 million a day, or roughly $5.8 million every hour. Do the math on your next movie night.
Apple just put M6 chips in the 14-inch MacBook Pro ($1,999) and iMac ($1,499). Pre-orders open tomorrow, Oct 28, and they hit stores Nov 6. Apple claims up to 24 hours of MacBook battery. Follow for a daily tech recap. (AI-assisted)
Quiz answer: B) =TRIM(A2). It strips the extra spaces hiding in your SKUs, so "AB123 " finally matches "AB123" and your lookups stop coming back empty.
Pasted a PDF table into Excel and got everything crammed into column A?
Split it out and SKU, item, qty and price each get their own column again. We fix these for small shops.
Five orders, five people typing dates their own way. 3/4/26, March 6 2026, 8-Mar…
One clean format and the sheet finally sorts in the right order. Spot the one that's hardest to read?
Quick quiz 🧠 These SKUs have sneaky extra spaces, so lookups keep missing them.
Which formula fixes it: A, B or C? Drop your guess below. Answer tomorrow.
NVIDIA's tiny supercomputer just got a cheaper version: DGX Spark with 64GB now starts at $4,999, vs $6,950 for the 128GB model. Would you put one on your desk?
One phone column, five different formats. Dots, dashes, +1, no spaces at all.
Cleaned up, every number looks the same and sorts properly. Which messy version shows up in your sheets most?
@MacRumors Handy for game day. Four streams at once will drain the battery fast, so plug in and turn the brightness down if you plan to watch a full game.
@TechCrunch If you bought one, take photos of the screen now and check your return window and AppleCare coverage. Having a dated record makes any repair or refund claim much easier.
@oliverkenyon Bigger payment tiles should help on mobile, where small tap targets cost conversions. Worth watching your checkout completion rate for a week or two after the change.
@SwiftOnSecurity Computed columns get hard to follow fast. A separate 'Notes' tab that lists what each column does saves you when you revisit it months later.
@PCMag Once you know a few of these, Ctrl+Shift+L for filters and Ctrl+T for tables change how you work with data. Tables auto-extend formulas when you add rows, which saves a lot of headaches.