Quick thing before we start. I'm working on a new course on Copilot for Microsoft 365, and it pre-launches in November. Claude and ChatGPT have been my go-to tools for a while, and I used them for pretty much everything. But Copilot has improved a lot in recent months, and with the new capabilities I can finally see how crazy helpful it is for anyone who works with data and has all the Microsoft apps at work anyway. If you'd like to be one of the first in, I'd love to have you on the interest list. You'll get early access in November, plus the best price.

Okay, on to this week.

Something that always bothered me was seeing my desktop files show up in OneDrive. Then one day, while I was travelling, I wanted to work on a presentation I’d saved to my desktop. When I tried to open it, I got a message saying I needed an internet connection.

I was confused and upset. Since when does opening my own desktop file require an internet connection?

Turns out Windows had been syncing my Desktop, Documents and Pictures to OneDrive in the background. I don’t recall ever seeing a screen that asked me about it.

And yes, I know about "Always keep on this device." It means you can open your files offline, but they’re still syncing to OneDrive and using up your cloud storage. I didn't expect my desktop to end up on the cloud though. I wanted my local folder to stay only on my PC.

To be clear, I’m not anti-cloud. I keep my work files in OneDrive and SharePoint. But my private documents stay on my PC, and I back them up separately. That should be a choice, not a default.

So I figured turning off the sync would be simple. It wasn't.

If you go with the default selection on one of the screens, your local folders can end up empty. Your files are still safe in the cloud, but that’s the exact opposite of what you were trying to do.

I’ve talked to many people who had my exact issue and just wanted their files on their own device. So in this week’s video, I show you how to take your folders back safely, including four quick checks to do before you touch that screen.

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Worth a watch even if you’re not sure this is happening on your PC.

🤓 Geeky News

📋 Planner gets a side pane and a spot in Outlook

Microsoft Planner now has a Task Details Side Pane. Click a task and its details open next to your plan, not on top of it. You can change who it's assigned to, the dates, the notes and the checklist, and still see your Board, Grid or My Tasks view. Planner also remembers your layout the next time you open it.

Planner is also in Outlook now, for both your own tasks and your team's shared plans. To add it in Outlook on the web or the new Outlook for Windows, go to Apps, search for Planner, then add it and pin it.

Handy if your to-do list already lives in your inbox anyway.

📊 Live Power BI visuals in Outlook

You can now drop a live Power BI chart into an email. It's not a screenshot. It's the actual chart, connected to the report, so it shows the latest data when someone opens the email.

People who get the email can hover over data points, see which filters and slicers you had on, check when the data was last refreshed, and click through to the full report.

To share one, open the report in the Power BI service. Click More options (…) on the chart, choose Share, then Link to this visual. You can decide whether to keep your current filters. Copy the link and paste it into an email in Outlook on the web. After a few seconds, the chart appears in the email.

It's in preview, and it only works in Outlook on the web for now, not the desktop app.

📈 Google Sheets gets stock charts

Google Sheets now has two types of stock charts. Each one shows a whole day's price movement (or a week's, or a month's) as one small marker, not as several separate lines.

• High-Low-Close shows the highest price, the lowest price and where the price closed.
• Open-High-Low-Close adds the opening price, so you can see right away if the price went up or down that period.

If you open an Excel file with stock charts in Sheets, the charts now come along. Until now, Sheets just dropped them, and you had to build them again.

👏 More of the work I enjoy

Power Query can be truly transformative. Jérôme came to appreciate it after taking our Master Excel Power Query course:

Jérôme Veilleux Estimating Coordinator

Tasks that used to take days now take hours, and things that took hours can be done in minutes. My improved Power Query skills allowed me to take on a broader role at work while actually reducing the day-to-day effort required to get things done. I’m now getting more of the kind of work I genuinely enjoy. I’ve become the Excel go-to person in my office, and it’s been a lot of fun solving problems in ways that feel almost magical to people who are not familiar with these tools.

My favorite part is the word "fun." It’s not a word most people expect next to Excel. But once the boring steps run by themselves, you get to focus on the parts you actually enjoy.

Congrats, Jérôme!

And see you all next week,

Leila

P.S. I’ve been having a lot of fun with Copilot lately (especially in Excel). If you’d like to join me in November, here’s the interest list.

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