I once typed a rate straight into a formula instead of referencing the cell. Just to test something. Then I forgot about it.

That's the thing about hard-coded numbers. Some hide better than others. The ones typed directly into a cell get caught fast: Find & Select, Go To Special, done.

A number typed straight into a formula is the one that causes real trouble. It won't update when everything else does, so your totals drift and you have no idea why. Go To Special can't see it, and Show Formulas just hands you a wall of text to squint at.

So I built a way to flag them with conditional formatting, using a pattern you can adjust to catch exactly what you want and ignore what you don't.

Let me walk you through it in this video:

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🤓 Geeky News

✈️ New models and new skills in Copilot

July updates to Excel and other Microsoft 365 apps are all Copilot-related.

Microsoft added Anthropic's Claude Sonnet 5 as a model option in Copilot for Word, PowerPoint, and Cowork, alongside OpenAI's new GPT-5.6. Cowork also gets Claude Fable 5, built for longer, more complex projects. You can now pick which model handles your task instead of being stuck with one.

Excel, meanwhile, picked up two new skills. (AI skills are a type of agents that can handle repeatable tasks.)

The Brand-kit skill applies your company's colors, fonts, logo to tables and charts automatically. Theme-design applies a coordinated style, so charts stop looking like they came from three different reports.

Ask Copilot to "brand my sheet" or "polish this," and it handles the formatting. No more hunting for the right shade of blue in 12 different charts.

And if you're using the Copilot app, you can now @mention the Word, Excel, and PowerPoint agents directly in Copilot prompt to add it to the chat and create new documents this way.

📝 Google Forms can now build your quiz for you

Gemini in Google Forms can now generate a full quiz from a prompt, including question types, settings, and correct answers. It's similar to what Copilot does in MS Forms.

You can point it to a Doc, Slide, or PDF and have it pull the quiz content straight from there.

Of course, you can (and should) review and adjust the quiz before you share it.

Rolling out now to paid accounts.

❇️ Same result, way less formula

Quick one for anyone who's taken Master Excel's Essential Modern Functions. I built that course back in 2018, right when dynamic arrays first landed. Huge deal at the time. Formulas that used to stretch across three helper columns suddenly fit on one line.

But dynamic arrays didn't stop there. We've gotten a bunch of new functions since, and some of the course solutions can now be written a lot simpler. So I went back and updated them.

Here's one example. This used to be how you'd pull digits out of a text string:

Now it's this:

Same result. A fraction of the formula.

The updated solution files are already available for members inside the course, with the new formulas and walkthroughs. Look for lectures indicated with 🆕 in the course outline and re-download the files.

👏 A revelation, 20 years in

Christian shared this after working through Master Excel's Essential Modern Functions:

Christian Fiset

This course was a revelation to me from the beginning. I've been using Excel for 20+ years, and yet, I've learned so much in this course that it will change the way I build my reports, making my life so much easier. I have a LOT of takeaways: FILTER, UNIQUE, SUMIFS, SEQUENCE to name a few. All very powerful functions that I've already started using at work.

Twenty years in and still new things to learn. Same here, honestly. The learning never really stops.

See you next week,

Leila

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