spreadsheet automation

Microsoft kicked off the first trading week of 2026 with a pratfall: Excel's STOCKHISTORY function went dark for many users, returning connection errors and stale data at a moment when investors and spreadsheet power users expected live—or at least reliably refreshed—market numbers. Background...

Microsoft’s Copilot Agent Mode for Excel promises to turn hours of spreadsheet drudgery into minutes by planning, executing, validating, and iterating multi‑step workflows inside the workbook — from consolidation and reconciliation to formula generation, conditional formatting, and dashboard...

Michael Jarman’s victory lap at the HyperX Esports Arena felt, at first, like the kind of human triumph the Microsoft Excel World Championship (MEWC) was built to celebrate — speed, intuition, and years of spreadsheet apprenticeship on stage — but that scene now hangs against a rapidly changing...

Michael Jarman’s upset at the HyperX Esports Arena—winning the 2024 Microsoft Excel World Championship and hoisting a wrestling-style belt—was supposed to be a human triumph: speed, intuition, and decades of spreadsheet apprenticeship on full display. Instead, the celebration now feels like a...

Google’s October Workspace Drop is a far-reaching push to make Gemini the connective tissue of productivity — adding cinematic video generation, presentation automation, live translation, spreadsheet-level automation, and even AI-assisted ransomware protection — a package that shifts Workspace...

Microsoft says finance teams can now pull ERP-connected data, reconciliation workflows, variance explanations, and customer-facing draft responses into Excel and Outlook using the Finance solution in Microsoft 365 Copilot — a role-based AI experience Microsoft has moved to general availability...

Microsoft is moving beyond single‑prompt Copilot chat and into what it calls “vibe working” — a new pattern that stitches multistep, steerable agents directly into Office apps so Copilot can plan, build, validate and iterate on documents, spreadsheets and presentations on your behalf. The...

Microsoft’s Office productivity stack is entering a new phase: after years of deep reliance on OpenAI, Microsoft will begin routing select Copilot workloads inside Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook to Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet 4 models, creating a multi‑model Copilot that assigns the “right...

Microsoft’s latest update quietly pulls a dramatic change into Excel’s typing box: AI-driven formula completion that suggests, explains, and can even preview formulas the moment you type “=”, folding natural-language Copilot capabilities into one of the oldest—and most error-prone—workflows in...

Microsoft has quietly changed one of Excel’s oldest conventions: now you can call an AI assistant from inside a worksheet cell the same way you call SUM or VLOOKUP — with a new COPILOT function that accepts plain‑language prompts, references ranges and tables, and returns dynamic, spillable...

Microsoft has quietly moved one of Excel’s most persistent friction points — knowing the exact function syntax you need — into the spreadsheet itself by introducing an in‑cell Copilot capability that turns plain‑English prompts into live formulas and structured outputs, effectively treating a...

Microsoft has put generative AI directly into the cell grid: the new COPILOT function lets users type plain‑English prompts into Excel formulas and returns live, spillable outputs — summaries, classifications, tables and more — that update automatically as the underlying data changes. This...

Microsoft has folded generative AI directly into Excel’s calculation engine with a native =COPILOT formula that lets users type natural‑language prompts into cells, reference worksheet ranges for context, and receive live, spillable outputs that recalculate automatically when the source data...

Microsoft's decision to let Excel call a Copilot directly from the formula bar — the new =COPILOT function — marks one of the clearest signals yet that generative AI is becoming a native part of everyday productivity tooling rather than an add‑on sitting in a sidebar or separate app. The...

Microsoft is rolling a generative AI function directly into Excel’s calculation engine — a native formula called COPILOT that lets users pass natural‑language prompts and optional grid ranges to a cloud AI model and receive live, recalculating outputs inside cells, a capability that closely...

Fundamental Research Labs’ new product, Shortcut, has forced a familiar office question into the open: if spreadsheets can be written, audited, and modeled by agentic AI from a single natural-language prompt, does anybody still need to open Excel every day? Background Fundamental Research Labs...

Microsoft Excel users are enjoying a wave of innovation as August 2025 ushers in five noteworthy features designed to supercharge productivity, bolster data integrity, and bridge long-standing gaps across platforms. From automation and compatibility improvements to sweeping enhancements in data...

Microsoft Excel has long stood as the world’s go-to spreadsheet application, renowned for its versatility across finance, business intelligence, and countless data-centric fields. But as the tidal wave of data grows and analytical expectations soar, Excel is rapidly evolving—with artificial...

In the fast-evolving landscape of productivity software, Microsoft Excel remains at the forefront by constantly advancing its capabilities to meet the demands of both casual and power users. As of July 2025, Microsoft has rolled out a range of new features aimed at streamlining workflows...

The promise of seamlessly blending Python with Excel has electrified the data analytics world, presenting a radical shift from formula-ridden spreadsheets to Python-powered workbooks on Microsoft 365. While spreadsheet users have long relied on a patchwork of formulas and occasional VBA scripts...