Take my Copilot in Excel course for FREE, and please share it with someone who could use it! The full LinkedIn Learning course, "Excel with Copilot: AI-Driven Data Analysis," is unlocked for everyone. No account required. Over 200,000 learners have joined the course, where I cover practical ways to use Copilot to write and troubleshoot formulas, organize your data, create charts, and explore useful insights. You can even use it as a formula tutor when you'd like to understand why something works before copying it down 10,000 rows. 🙂 Start learning for free: linkedin.com/learning/excel-… And please help me spread the word! A repost or a quick message to a colleague makes a real difference. As a business owner, these shares help my teaching reach people I might never connect with otherwise. I appreciate it so much.

100% this will be me in a couple days leaving Kauai (except wearing an aloha shirt)

Do you think AI agents are going to make people even more antisocial and misanthropic? Because I know that's how I feel nowadays when I get radio silence from someone tbh. It's literally NEVER been easier to respond to people or provide timely service. Like, you can now literally phone it in by having an AI agent respond for you, and you can't even be bothered to do THAT? Good riddance!

Excel has a skill recorder now, and my first reaction was: do we need another record button? If a task follows fixed rules, I'd usually start with formulas, VBA, Office Scripts, or Power Query. A saved, reviewed implementation gives you something concrete to run again next month. Where the recorder gets more interesting is when the calculation stays the same but the questions change. I tested that with a small order-review example, inspected the generated skill, and reran it after changing the data. I also tried connecting it to a separate skill with JSON settings and a Python check. The post includes the practice workbook and prompts, plus when the dedicated Get Data skill for Power Query might be a better fit. stringfestanalytics.com/exce…

Counterpoint: Lewis Thomas suggested introducing humanity to extraterrestrial intelligence with "Bach, all of Bach, streamed out into space, over and over again." If we've now achieved AGI and "the intelligence part is solved," has that changed what we'd send? I'd still send Bach, which makes me wonder what exactly we're claiming to have solved. Just saying.

This is such a profoundly Cartesian way of thinking about intelligence. LOL. Computers have been beating the best human chess players for decades. Somehow, people still watch humans play chess. And I'm willing to bet people will still want to hear a human being play Bach on the cello, even when AI can produce a flawless performance in two seconds. There's something deeply reductionist about treating intelligence as disembodied, reducing intellectual life to impressive outputs, and declaring it obsolete when a machine does them better. Thinking is something embodied, social human beings do. The struggle, interpretation, personality, and experience of another mind matter. Look, I'm not a philosopher. Maybe someone smarter than me can dismantle this argument. I'd love that. Because two humans having a spirited intellectual disagreement about the nature of intelligence would rather beautifully prove my point. LOL.

I end pretty much every email newsletter with a question related to whatever I've been writing about. I explicitly tell people they're welcome to reply, that I read every response, and that I'll write back. And I mean it! You know how many people actually take me up on that? Maybe one in 5,000. LOL. Look, I get it. People are busy. We all consume way more content than we actually engage with. But I do find it a little funny that we hear SO MUCH about the loneliness epidemic, how nobody makes real connections anymore, how we need to build communities and be more human online, etc. And then when someone literally says, "Hey, I'd love to hear what you think, and I'll actually write you back!" it's basically crickets. 😂 I also wonder if we've gotten so used to being marketed to that we just assume these invitations are some automated engagement gimmick. Which is kind of sad when you think about it. I don't know. I guess I'm just surprised by how many people are perfectly happy to read along without ever saying a word. The internet really is just 99.9% lurkers. RIP.

What's New in Excel (October 2026) techcommunity.microsoft.com/…

You will soon be able to ask Excel to fetch, clean, and load data for you using Copilot - goo.gl/alerts/ouPkMv #GoogleAlerts

It should be illegal in this country to have to PAY for the privilege of applying for employment. Upwork's whole "Connects" system, where freelancers have to purchase credits just to submit proposals for jobs they may never even hear back about, is an affront to the American spirit of free enterprise. Ban this nonsense. God bless America. 🇺🇸🦅

Just got off a call about an AI training project that was very much the "$500 client" experience. They wanted someone to meet with stakeholders, understand their business processes, identify opportunities, build custom demos, and teach advanced workshops. The proposed hours barely seemed to account for preparing any of this. So you need a trainer who is also a business analyst and consultant, with examples perfectly suited to your company, somehow ready before they've even met you. Quite a unicorn you're shopping for on that budget! Meanwhile, some of my best-paying clients are perfectly happy buying a workshop I've already developed. They know what I specialize in and want me to teach it. Having good material ready to go is actually a selling point. They also trust their staff to adapt what they learn. If the example uses sales data and you work in operations, we can probably get through this without rebuilding the entire course around your department. These clients are happy to pay a premium for my best content off the shelf. I get to be me, teach something I know well, and spend time helping people understand it instead of trying to become their business analyst before Thursday.

These AI predictions are getting increasingly religious. Prophets, apocalyptic timelines, the end of human intellectual history, the whole works. William F. Buckley Jr. famously warned against trying to “immanentize the eschaton,” essentially attempting to bring about some final, utopian end state of history here on Earth. The AI crowd seems to have its own version, except instead of bringing about paradise, they're predicting the imminent arrival of a technological messiah that renders human intellectual labor obsolete. I think we need an updated warning: Stop trying to immanentize the AGI! At least the medieval prophets had the decency not to put the apocalypse on a 1–5 year product roadmap. 😂

A custom skill gives Copilot in Excel a reusable way to carry out a task. When that task is a recurring report, including Python code and JSON settings in the skill can make the process much more reproducible. In this expense-report example, the Python script contains the calculations and review rules, while JSON defines which results appear in the report and how they're presented. The skill's instructions tell Copilot how to prepare the data, run the script, apply the settings, and check the finished report. Those choices are now saved in files you can inspect, test, and reuse when the next month's data arrives. You're giving Copilot a defined process to follow, with specific rules and results you can check. The video and companion post follow a small expense table through that whole process, showing why these supporting files are useful parts of a skill: stringfestanalytics.com/json… If your team has a recurring report you'd like to make more reproducible, I'd be glad to help you build a skill around it.

A custom Copilot skill can include a Python script that actually RUNS. That, frankly, deserves more attention! You can save a calculation or data check as code, then ask Copilot to run that same implementation on new workbook data. The Python execution happens in the cloud, so the person using the skill doesn't need to install Python on their computer. This takes some of the adventure out of the classic "here's my Python script, good luck" handoff. 🙂 In my latest tutorial, we use a prepared skill to check expenses, then change one dollar and rerun it. That tiny change lets us verify something important: did the saved code apply the same rule correctly to the updated data? The walkthrough includes the workbook, skill files, and copy-ready prompts. You don't need to write Python to follow along. Try the tutorial: stringfestanalytics.com/pyth…

Still can't get over the fact that I got to see a band from Niʻihau, THE FORBIDDEN ISLAND, at the Rice Street Block Party on Kauaʻi this weekend! How COOL is that?! For those who don't know, Niʻihau is a privately owned Hawaiian island just west of Kauaʻi. It's been largely closed to outsiders for generations, and its small community has preserved the Hawaiian language and many traditional customs in a way that's pretty unique, even within Hawaiʻi. So to get to hear musicians from an island that most people will never even set foot on, performing live at a neighborhood block party, was just incredible. And they were SO GOOD! Seriously, one of the coolest experiences I've had on this trip! If you want to check them out, they were the first band to perform in this livestream recording of the block party: Rice Street Block Party 2026 | Main Stage LIVE | Līhuʻe, Kauaʻi youtube.com/live/-OkzF8qeXuY…