When I worked in finance, the reports I had to build almost always needed data from different tables. Sales figures sitting in one. Product details in another. And the report needed both.

So I did what most people still do. I used VLOOKUP to pull everything into the sales table until it turned into one mega giant table. Ok, these days you'd reach for XLOOKUP, but it's still the same move.

It worked, but it was slower and more work than it needed to be. I had no clue there was a cleaner way. I only found out years later. I didn't need to merge the tables at all.

I just had to connect them.

It's called a Relationship, and it lives inside something Excel calls the Data Model. Think of it as a quiet backstage area where your tables can reference each other, without you copying a single column between them.

Here's the flow: you pick one column both tables share (like Product Code), tell Excel "these two are the same thing," and that's it. The tables stay exactly as they are. But now you can build a Pivot Table that pulls from both at once, like "Total Sales by Department," even though Department only exists in the other table.

No formulas and no duplicated data.

I walk through it in the multi-sheet Pivot Table tutorial. There's a video in there too.

🤓 Geeky News

🌈 Excel tables now import cleanly into Google Sheets

Google Sheets can now properly import Excel tables as actual Sheets tables. Plus, pivot tables built on those tables come in still linked, instead of turning into static grids.

If your team is half on Excel and half on Sheets, this one removes a real headache.

🔗 Connected Sheets gets usability upgrades

Google's rolling out two BigQuery improvements for Connected Sheets.

Connected Sheets lets you pull live data from BigQuery (Google's cloud database for huge datasets) straight into a spreadsheet.

You can now feed a whole range of cells to use as parameters, instead of typing them one by one. It's handy for building a dropdown filter for non-technical users.

And you can assign aliases to database column names without touching the actual query underneath. Great for column names that are too cryptic or too long for presentation purposes.

✈️ COPILOT function: over before it began

Microsoft is killing the =COPILOT() function in Excel on September 14, before it ever left preview. It let you write AI prompts directly into a formula.

Having a function that only worked with an add-on license has always felt strange, although it had some practical uses.

Still, Microsoft itself warned against using it for calculations or anything with legal or compliance weight.

If you're one of the Insiders who played with it, paste your COPILOT formulas over as values before they stop working.

And if you do have the Copilot license, some of the capability stays available through the side pane.

👏 A deliberate investment

Alexandru just finished Excel Data Modeling with Power Pivot & DAX and posted this on LinkedIn:

Congrats, Alexandru. Building a proper model feels less exciting than asking an AI tool for insights, but in finance you need the number to be the same every single time.

See you next week,

Leila

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