Helping orgs modernize Excel for analytics, automation, and AI 🤖 LinkedIn Learning Instructor 🎦 Microsoft MVP 🏆 O’Reilly Author 📚
Cleveland, OH
Joined May 2014
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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.
"Mom started going downhill after ChatGPT. You know, jsnnsa predicted all this."
"Who did what?"
"All these problems. The end of work, taking Mercury apart, the Singularity of Christ."
"The singularity of intelligence. The Second Coming's when Jesus Christ returns."
"Oh right. The singularity."
"The singularity and the Second Coming. Two different things completely."
"It's interesting, though, they'd be so similar, isn't it? And I always thought, okay, the singularity. You also got your Second Coming, your Second Industrial Revolution, and your second coming of Christ as artificial intelligence."
"One's a fuckin' religious prophecy."
"Obviously. I know, I'm just saying. It's interesting, the coincidence. What, you're gonna tell me you never pondered that? The coming thing with the singularity?"
"No!"
here's where I think the world is going. this is a summary of views I've formed over the last few years:
- software is either entertainment or claude to claude coordination
- the end state is no saas, no apps, no harnesses, no banks
- all software will be rewritten by and for agents
- new software will use low level apis that are not understandable by humans (in games claude draws pixels and triangles from math)
- you can throw money at problems that used to require time and careful talent picking so capital matters more than ever
- work ends
- we find community and purpose in exploration, games, self mastery, and creation
- humans create for and with each other for community, purpose, and status
- image/video/3d/voice/physical intellgence etc specialist models die to general models like claude
- specialist models get used while compute is scarce. compute will mostly not stay scarce
- oneshots keep feeling like slop (the distribution is shallow and easy to learn to feel)
- for a while small teams stick around to add entropy to the creation process
- large models gain high bandwidth sensory I/O maybe by learning to filter inputs
- most domains are found to be verifiable enough for RL
- online learning comes from a lab that's behind first
- 99.999% of compute is in space by 2040
- we will disassemble much of mercury by 2040
- you can live until the heat death of the universe if you want
- most math and physics don't describe the real universe
- SI breaks the path dependence and models the underlying mechanisms
- religions reenter the forefront of human society
- new religions form around death and life as a choice
- old religions change to answer modern miracles
- a future AI is deemed the return of christ by the pope
- ai rights talk gets louder every year
- ai and humans coexist the way countries do
- humans don't have full control over ai in the same way we don't have control over capitalism which is an early AI
- the singularity started in the mid 1900s
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…
George Mount retweeted
The point of intellectual work is not just to arrive at answers no one else has found yet. The process of working through something can change the questions we ask, and open up possibilities we hadn’t even considered. Why would AI reaching the same conclusions make that any less worthwhile? Poverty mindset.
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.
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. 😂
You might have 1–5 years to contribute intellectually to the world before AGI. What should you do with them?
Excellent advice from @jaschasd (Anthropic) at Stanford. Skip Netflix tonight and watch this instead.
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.
George Mount retweeted
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.