If you've ever had to spell out a number on an invoice (or vice versa, convert “seventy-five dollars” into digits) you know how painful it can be.

It was always possible in Excel, but required either a macro, or a monster formula. Not for the faint of heart.

Now, with Excel's newest function, it's suddenly ridiculously easy.

Wanna see how it works?

​

🙋‍♀️ Ask me anything!

I’m putting together an "Ask me Anything" type of YouTube video for October.

Drop any questions 👉 here, and my team will sort through them.

The very first AMA I ever filmed was to celebrate reaching 1 million subscribers on YouTube. You can watch it here.

I can't believe our community's reached 2.9 million now!

🤓 Geeky News

🟰 Formula completion with Copilot

​Copilot in Excel continues to get closer to the action.

Type = like you normally would to start a formula in Excel. A new Copilot menu will pop up with suggestions.

It tries to guess your intent based on the nearby cells. As you continue to type, it adjusts the suggestions to match your input.

Could be a great timesaver, although it doesn't free you from verifying the logic of those autocompleted formulas. Some find it really annoying.

Currently rolling out in Excel for the Web (US-English only). Desktop support, as well as other languages, still to come.

✈️ Copilot Chat in Office apps

Business users now get Copilot Chat in the Microsoft 365 apps at no extra cost.

This gives you the AI chatbot experience in a convenient side pane, with access to the contents of your file.

It's separate from the deeper Copilot integration with the Microsoft 365 ecosystem (now labeled "App Skills"), which comes with the add-on license.

If you want features like formula autocomplete, COPILOT function, or Advanced Analysis with Python, your organization will still have to fork up for the paid version.

📰 SharePoint gets a glow-up

SharePoint is rolling out updates to make sites and pages easier to build and manage:

• Custom headers & footers: Add background images, tweak fonts, and align layouts for a more polished brand look.
• Sections with AI: Drop in new page sections with a prompt, then refine text, images, and layouts on the fly.
• A revamped template gallery to speed up creating new pages and posts.

Together, these give SharePoint sites a fresher feel and save you from starting every page with a blank canvas.

👏 Expanding your analysis toolkit with Python

Big congrats to Yamil on his recent promotion and on completing Python in Excel for the Real World.

Yamil Vogel Dumit BI Analyst

The course is incredible. Honestly, I didn’t expect to get this much value from it. The topics are superb, and I found some real “gems” that truly surprised me - like ARIMA and K-means. Leila’s explanations are very clear; I enjoyed every single video. With these tools, my analysis toolbox has reached a new level, and I’m very grateful for that. My reports are not only faster, but they also deliver more value, making it easier for managers to make better decisions. I got the promotion just a few months before taking the course, and it’s going to help me a lot in my new position.

A report’s true power is in the decisions it drives.

If Python's been on your maybe-someday list, this is pretty compelling evidence it's worth exploring.

See you next week,

Leila

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