You've got a long list like this that needs to go into separate columns.

Copy-paste?

Nope. From now on copy-paste is officially banned for this type of work 🚫

There's a single function that does the whole thing in seconds.

👉 Here's how it works​

Imagine copy-pasting 500 contacts! My wrist cramps up even thinking about it.

🤓 Geeky News

Copilot in Outlook now handles your calendar

Microsoft just made Copilot in Outlook agentic. Meaning it doesn't wait for you to ask. It sorts through your inbox, drafts follow-ups for emails that went unanswered, creates inbox rules, and reschedules calendar conflicts on its own.

You can also ask it to catch you up after a vacation, protect your focus time, or prep you for an upcoming meeting.

Available now through Microsoft's Frontier program.

Whether you want your AI to have that much access to your inbox is, of course, a personal decision. 👀

🤖 Copilot in Excel improvements

Microsoft added a few useful controls to Copilot in Excel.

The toggle between the default Edit mode (Copilot makes the changes directly) and Chat mode (Copilot advises, you implement) is now easier to find.

Plus another mode is coming: Plan mode. In it, Copilot shows you the steps it intends to take before touching anything. You can review and adjust before anything changes. Useful when you're about to let AI loose on a file that took you three hours to build.

And Advanced Analysis with Python is (supposed to be) back. Copilot can create Python charts and other visual outputs as part of your requested edits.

I don't seem to have this update yet. The Python visuals I get from Copilot are static images, not connected to cell values like they used to be. When I ask for the connected version, it tells me it can't do that. It offers to give me the code to copy and paste. Which didn't work, by the way. 🙄

So we've gone backwards with Copilot for Python in Excel. Hoping this new update fixes it.

🌈 More AI capabilities in Google Sheets

Not to be outdone, Google packs more AI into Sheets. Three updates dropped at once:

• ​Fill with Gemini - start typing a pattern in a column and Gemini fills the rest. Drag and drop, or you can write a custom prompt for what you need.
• ​Paste and convert - paste messy text, a bulleted list, or JSON into Sheets and a "Convert to table" button appears. One click, instant structure.
• ​Build with Gemini - describe the spreadsheet you need and Gemini builds the whole thing. Pivot tables, charts, formulas, formatted and ready.

All rolling out through May to paid Workspace plans.

They're also improving Sheets overall capacity. Large files open up to 30% faster, filtering is up to 60% faster, and the cell limit is doubling from 10M to 20M cells in beta. Available to all Google Workspace users.

🤔 Did You Know?

What if you want to "unwrap" rows, get them back into a single column?

There's another function for that: TOCOL().

Feed it any table, and it will return it as a column.

Want the data in a single cell, as a comma delimited list? Use ARRAYTOTEXT().

Handy when you need to feed data into another tool and it only accepts a flat list.

👏 Part of my toolkit

Lili just finished Fast Track to Power BI and posted this on LinkedIn:

Congrats, Lili.

Always nice to see Power BI showing up on people's resumes.

See you next week,

Leila

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