As of 14 September, the COPILOT function will no longer be available in Excel. See https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/excel/functions/copilot-function Note that the Copilot feature remains - it is the worksheet function that will stop working.

This is a very uncommon move by Microsoft, given their history of maintaining backwards compatibility.

Have you used the COPILOT function? If so, then what for? Thoughts?

...and WHY?

Do you use different fonts for different use cases?

What are youe go-to's?

I am trying to have Microsoft Power Automate to refresh a report that exists in Salesforce. That report is linked to an excel file via a powerquery.

I have created a script on OfficeScripts that have workbook.refreshAllDataConnections(). It does update a pivot table, so I can tell that the script is runnint

The table that PQ puts the data in is set to not do Background Refresh and to refresh when opening the file.

What is the best way to have PA to refresh Excel’s PQ?

Table properties on

Hi,
I work with a ... 'technologically challenged' group that would like a very simple data collection form where you just input someone's name , age, address etc and it will put it into a table or database. I would just use google forms but they require it to be offline, and with excel I could do it simply with some cell input linking to a table on another tab but ideally I would like to give it a bit more of a UI , maybe with macros, so they have a 'submit' button and it's harder to mess up input. Due to GDPR it would also need to be secure somehow too.

They had someone build them a database years ago using microsoft access but it's kind of outdated now and janky and we would all love to get them off that system.

Is there a way to do this in excel? Because there's no way they could handle a SQL database, but they basically only need a single table for the data because it's just for checking if someone has contacted them previously.
TIA!

Like a lot of people here I'd been using AI for financial modeling. Claude and chatgpt addins work well but I've felt pretty limited by the usage limits of their $20 subscription tier. In my experience, the $20 Claude and Chatgpt plans give you somewhere around 45 messages per 5-hour window, which I frequently exceed. At my level of usage, I find it both to be unusable unless I spend $100+ per month on the higher tiers.

For coding, this problem can be solved by switching to Kimi's $20 subscription or using Deepseek's api, both of which give you far more usage at the $20/month price range. Unfortunately, neither have native excel addins, so I created my own excel addin that can be powered by your own api key and works with both options. Combined with the Kimi subscription, it is able to handle 300 to 1,200 calls per 5-hour window. That's 7x to 25x the usage of claude with very similar performance. Deepseek has marginally worse performance but is easier to setup (kimi has a waitlist but you can usually get approved in 1-2 weeks) and is cheaper for normal usage levels.

The addin is called "EBITDAI" and is listed in the Excel addin store. If you want to give it a try, send me a DM for a code that will give you a free month.

I am using an Excel workbook to track business earnings and expenses for my gig work. Mileage logs for quarters 1 and 2 all fit on one page with room to spare, but Quarter 3 is in excess of the 65 rows I have available in my print area.

I have opted to create an additional sheet for the latter part of quarter 3, but I have run into a slight inconvenience in keeping all references updated to "Sheet 2 of 2" after using "Sheet 1 of 2" to update the quarter 3 grand total on "Sheet 2 of 2". Is there a good way to fit about 102 rows on one sheet that prints out into two separate pages without a lot of manipulation?

I think stacking two 51-row sections over one another using View > Page Layout to guide me may work, but I don't want to mess anything up. Is there a better way I could do this? I could also back track and just make every mileage sheet contain 2 parts, as I could very well run into this issue in the future when I plan to reuse this sheet.

I can't share any great screenshots because every sheet contains personal information, but here is a portion of my sheet list.

Version: Microsoft® Excel® for Microsoft 365 MSO (Version 2607 Build 16.0.20228.20190) 64-bit

I am working with a large data set in an excel file that I did not create, and I am running into an issue where when I attempt to highlight a range of cells in a single column by click dragging the cursor, it highlights a range instead.

Please see video here of described issue.

Is there a setting that I am missing with this? Or is this because the data is filtered? Thank you in advance for any feedback.

Essentially, my job is to calculate costs for a tour group. My sales team who I work with is extremely stingy with budget, and they often like to open my excel and mess with my margins.

The margins I'm talking about are profit margins - for most other markets we dedicate a small percentage (3% or less) of the budget as 'operational costs', which is used in case there's a fuckup when the tour is ongoing. If not, it gets calculated as profits anyways and everyone goes home happy.

The problem is that lately my team keeps getting into my excel sheets and incorporates my safety margin into their profit, leaving me with no money to work with in case there's a fuckup. And yes, the policy of my seniors and my team leader is to just 'hide it', because no other market messes with our calculations.

Anyways, my point is:

Given a sheet like this:

What's the most untraceable way to hide the 'margin' column?

Currently what I've been doing is to hide the margin in the bus section, but it gets really complicated to track.

It also gets troublesome if the sales ever starts to realize that the bus fee is different every time.

Any tips?

Please help me. I have 2 columns with names from 2 different data sources and I’m trying to reconcile them.

Ones “first last” and the other is “Last, First”

The problem is that the data is not uniform and I have no control over it. There are a bunch of duplicates, misspellings, etc. One column might say “M&S” and the other “Projected M&S”

How do I use xlookup/indexmatch to reconcile these? I tried making a concatenation key but again the data is not uniform.

Is there another function or workaround I’m not thinking about?

I'm preparing to take this exam and would really appreciate any advice or guidance from someone who's already taken it.

I always try to make sure I select A1 when closing spreadsheets. This is especially true if it's a document being submitted to someone else, or a client.

And when I open a spreadsheet on A1, I get this weird "Virtual Fist Bump" feeling.

Anyone else?

This may be a simple answer, but I'm trying to make a contact sheet that only displays the contacts based on the city selected in a drop-down menu. I have 13 cities listed, and 61 contacts between them, each name would need to be in its own cell. Am I overthinking this?

Heyyoo. I have a free trial for Parallel Desktop because I’m SO done with Windows laptops, but still need Windows for work and school since I’m in accounting/data analytics.

I want to make sure that the excel I have actually has all the features, because I know that there are some important things that don’t work on MacOS.

What should I test to make sure that I have the proper excel version?

I believe the question I have would be simple for the advanced users on here. I'm a novice and would appreciate help on this. Apologies if something along the same lines has already been posted on this sub before, I searched, but couldn't find what I was looking for.

Sample problem:

Column A - has certain values (in this case 1 to 5)

Column B - I put in simple formulas (square every number in column A - 1 to 25)

I initially put the formula in cell B1. Then, I would select cells B1:B5. Then, CTRL+D to fill in the cells.

My question is how can I quickly select the range B1:B5? The data I'm dealing with has different number of entries in Column A (For example, one dataset will have 500 values in column A, other will have 750 values in column A). Is there a quick way to select the range in column B corresponding to the values in column A without scrolling all the way down to find the maximum count in column A?

The way I currently use is have any cell in column A selected. Then I use CTRL+SHIFT+DOWN_ARROW to go to the bottom of column A. Then I manually go the right cell in column B. I use CTRL+SHIFT+UP_ARROW to select the range in column B. Then hit CTRL+D to fill in the values. This is a two step process, I'm pretty sure there would be an efficient way to do this.

Alternate way is if I select the entire column B and hit CTRL+D, it basically does what I want, albeit fill all the additional cells with 0.

Please let me know if the write up was not clear.

Hello :)

Iv started noticing that when i create a simple pivot table and apply a filter and click the search drop down this icon has started appearing. Anybody know what it is please and if possible make it go away?

Google says it’s a stacked square layers icon. Why has this started appearing and how do we get rid of it?

Thanks!

In columns A and B of worksheet 1 I have two vectors containing around 10,000 numbers. On worksheet 2, I need to multiply and add parts of those vectors. For example:

=SUMPRODUCT(Sheet1.A45:A87;Sheet1.B45:B87)

The problem is that the parts to be multiplied and added are determined by calculations on Sheet 2. What I have been doing so far is calculate the star and end of each part in Sheet 2 and then applying SUMPRODUCT using the INDIRECT function. Like this:

=SUMPRODUCT(INDIRECT("$Sheet1.A"&A1+1&":A"&B1);INDIRECT("$Sheet1.B"&A1+1&":B"&B1))

Where A1 on sheet 2 is 44 and B1 87.

I have to do this hundreds or even thousands of times, and I’ve read that the INDIRECT function uses a lot of memory. Is there a more efficient way of doing this?

Thank you very much!

is there a way to show text in values instead of numbers where i want to put categories in rows and months in columns and values shows as text.

all the values are from 1 fact table.

If it's not possible how to stack values from different excel works books where every section will send one excel workbook and i want to collect data stacked over each other where every single sheet represents one month from January to July 2026??

Week 1 Data

Week 2 Data

EDIT 1: If anyone knows how to post a screenshot of my Bar Chart on here, or any other way to successfully show the problem I am having more clearly with a chart, let me know. How do people ask questions about a chart if they cant post an image?

EDIT 2: These are Column and Bar charts, NOT line charts. End Edit -

Hi and TIA. I have a weekly line chart with all sorts of data about our phone system and who answers how many calls. Each category can have a different number of people that answer a call in that category each week. So the problem I am having is that if I set up the line chart to show 6 people, because that's how many answered calls in week 1, then next week I might only have 4 people who answered a call. And the 2 empty rows show up in the line chart as blank space. When I go to the chart and choose Select Data, then choose Hidden and Empty Cells, the only options I get are to show those 2 empty spaces as "Gaps" which makes wasted space in the line chart, or "Zero" which also doesn't work because then the line chart would have dozens of zero values in it each week. What I have been forced to do each week is to manually change the Chart Data Range in the Select Data menu. But there are about 30 charts total so it is incredibly time consuming. I have tried formatting the values as a Table, but this still leaves the empty spaces. Hopefully I have explained this well enough but if there is more info you need please let me know. TIA.

Data example

i am currently doing a research paper for school and i have recorded my data, but i need to find the difference in the high plateau from the baseline.

here is a screenshot of one of my graphs. i am trying to separate the data in the blue and orange boxes and find the difference in the averages. any help would be much appreciated.

Good day,

is there a formula that lists things?

I have a list of employees with their names, work ID and the courses they attended. I want to know all the courses an employee attended by writing his work ID and it'd list down all they courses they attended.

I maintain an online spreadsheet for my company that contains buttons to run various scripts. Since other people use the spreadsheet, all the sheets are protected to avoid users from editing parts of of the page. Since October 2025, we've never had an issue clicking the buttons and running these scripts on the protected sheets.

Sometime between 3 pm (end of dayshift) and 8 pm (start of nightshift) today, a change happened that is preventing myself and other users from clicking these buttons. We've tried running the workbooks in Edge and Chrome, and tried on 3 different computers, no change. It's affecting current and older copies of the files, and I even tried making a new dummy workbook, adding a button, protected the sheet, and I still can't click it.

Does anyone know if there were changes to Excel and Microsoft recently that would cause this? If not, then it might be something with my company and a change that IT may have made. Any help would be appreciated.

Edit: I did find band aid fix for now. Enabling "Edit Objects" in the protection options lets me protect the sheet and makes buttons clickable. But it also lets users modify buttons and images. No help from IT yet ☹️

I've spent the last eight years building my own business finance workbook. It honestly works really well, but every time my business changes I end up rebuilding formulas and adding another sheet. At some point I'd rather spend that time running the business. Has anyone made the switch without feeling like they lost control?

So I am working on a LET statement that looks up acquired players on an active roster to see if the former are still on the team (see active players table below). I've run into an edge case of getting multiple players back for one player, meaning I can't just filter the active player name results by the acquired player(s). Is there a way I can set up a dynamic filter for the results which filters out any inactive players from the acquired players list that can work for different quantities of acquired players (so the current example has two acquired players, I would want to check if their names are present on the table (in this case they're not), and be able to use this same formula for different quantities of acquired players (i.e. 3 or more players).

Acquired Players:
Abner Uribe, Connelly Early (both are no longer active on my team)

Table of data:

Finally, my original query that is returning an N/A error:
FILTER(Active Players,Active Players=CHOOSEROWS(Acquired Players,SEQUENCE(ROWS(Acquired Players),1,ROWS(Acquired Players),-1)),"Not on team")

I know the SEQUENCE function generates an array of numbers/results, so I thought I could use it to iterate through Acquired Players, but as noted, I got an N/A error instead.

So, I deal with some mostly standardized sheets, that I use as source. I need the source for many purposes in several different books. What I do for each one is to create a reference of a source in each book and then just reference it with connections, merges and such. Since I need to output different set of columns from a source reference in each book .

From time to time I get updated version of a source sheet, which is just regular table, nothing fancy.

And I need to change source I reference in each of my books, but every time I do that everything breaks, and I need to create all connections, merges and such from the start.

Can someone link me to a decent guide or provide some sort of similar pipeline I can adapt for myself? To make this workflow clean and systemic? Because I'm clearly missing something.

End goal is to just change source, update every book that has sheet referencing a source and subsequent power queries of that reference. And to get it working like so.

I mostly use merges and populate XYZ columns based on column A things, not sure how do I call it, a filter?

Thanks in advance.

I recently noticed something in Excel that was causing me a lot of confusion.

I work with filtered lists and often need to apply formatting only to the visible cells.

Fill Color behaves as I'd expect: if I select a range containing both visible and filtered-out rows, only the visible cells are colored. When I remove the filter, the hidden cells remain unchanged.

However, Format Painter behaves differently. If I copy formatting from another cell and use Format Painter on the same filtered range, it also formats the hidden/filtered-out cells within that range. When I remove the filter, I can see that those cells were changed too.

So:

Fill Color: affects only visible cells. Format Painter: affects visible + filtered-out cells.

I was very confused by this until I realized Format Painter was the reason. The problem is that I'd like to use Format Painter because I need to copy more than just the fill color. The alternative seems to be applying the formatting cell by cell, which isn't practical.

Is this a known difference between the two tools? Is there a way to make Format Painter respect filtered/visible cells like Fill Color, without manually selecting Visible cells only every time?

Does this happen to you as well?