The file nobody wants to touch
Every company has at least one Excel file that nobody fully understands. It usually belongs to someone who left.
In my corporate past, I had to make sense of quite a few of those.
Many sheets, lots of formulas and reports in every sheet.
Once a file like that becomes yours, you’re the one who has to answer for its numbers, even if you didn’t build any of them.
So how do you figure out where everything comes from?
Excel has a few tools that help a lot here, and in this video, I go through 8 of them.
One of them is Column Differences. Someone in the comments called it a gem, and it really is. It’s a simple feature that finds the formula that doesn’t match the rest of the column. That alone can save you a lot of trouble one day. 😉
Making sense of a big file is only one of the things Copilot can do now. It has changed a lot this past few months, and it can take over much more of the slow, manual work than most people realize.
That’s why I'm building a new course called Copilot at Work. Right now I'm finalizing the first part, Copilot in Excel.
On November 10th, we're opening it to insiders only. Insiders get early access, so they can start getting up to speed with Copilot in Excel before anyone else. If you'd like in, join the insider list.
🤓 Geeky News
✈️ Copilot in OneDrive can now build the report
We’ve talked about Copilot in OneDrive before. It could already summarize and compare your files. What’s new is that it can now make something from them.
You select a few spreadsheets and your notes, and it turns them into an interactive report. (That’s an HTML file, basically a small web page.) You can edit the report right in OneDrive, add comments, and share it with your team.
And if you build the same report every month, you can save the steps as a "skill." The skill is saved as a Markdown file, and next month Copilot follows the same steps again.
Monthly reporting on autopilot... in theory. I’d still check the numbers before it reaches my manager 👀
There are a few smaller updates too, like a new Libraries view. It’s a shortcut to your team’s SharePoint libraries right inside OneDrive, so you don’t have to hunt through sites to find them.
👩🏫 PowerPoint Live gets a few small upgrades
PowerPoint Live is the way you present slides inside a Teams meeting. It now has a dark mode (it follows your Teams theme) and a Notes pane you can resize or hide completely.
Plus, it now lets you use up and down arrow keys to move through slides. Your clicker should work with it too.
Just small usability improvements, but these often make a big difference.
It’s rolling out gradually, so give it a few weeks if you don’t see it yet.
🍏 Apple’s office apps get an AI assistant
Microsoft Office has Copilot. Google Workspace has Gemini. Now Apple is catching up and adding an AI assistant to Pages, Keynote, and Numbers. In Pages, it can draft and restructure your text. In Numbers, it can do calculations, organize data, and suggest charts. And in Keynote, it can help design and animate slides.
It’s built on models from Apple and OpenAI and is rolling out in beta on devices with Apple Intelligence. There aren’t many details yet. It doesn’t even have a catchy name. (iAI? 😜)
🤔 Did You Know?
You’re writing a conditional formatting rule and want to remove a dollar sign, so $J$2 becomes $J2. You press the left arrow to get there... and Excel adds a new cell reference instead. D’oh!
The fix is to press F2.
It switches the box from Point mode (picking cells) to Edit mode, so the arrow keys move the cursor instead.
This works in any Excel box where you select cells from the sheet. But conditional formatting is where it always frustrated me the most.
👏 "I do know it can be done"
Mark took Python in Excel For the Real World and shared this:
Mark Godwin
Inventory Analyst
As a data analyst, Excel is with me all day, and I can achieve almost anything needed. However, this sometimes involves a lot of complex formulae and creating helper columns. Having seen a few Python in Excel videos, I realised this was a tool that could speed up some of that work.
The course allows you a glimpse behind the curtain of what else is possible. I may not know "how to," but I do know "it can be done," and most importantly, where to find the relevant information.
I can foresee changes to a number of reporting tools that currently rely on Power Query alone. PQ will still do the heavy lifting, but much of the display of data can now be handled using Python, providing two very useful benefits: speedier loading of data, as a refresh is not required, and a reduction in workbook size.
Thanks, Mark. Power Query for the heavy lifting and Python for the display is a nice split. And a smaller workbook is always welcome.
I think a lot of us worry about making the wrong decision. But you can only make a good one when you know what your options are. That goes for life, and it goes for Excel reports too.
See you next week,
Leila
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