Copilot in Excel documents

More recently, Microsoft Copilot, an AI-based assistant, has become an integral part of Excel in all its versions. Now it can help you, in English or another language, analyze data, create charts, offer you the appropriate Excel function, or show you its syntax. To put a long story short, it can make your daily work much more productive!

Focusing on content

Excel has recently gained several new features that make it easier to focus on the content, i.e. the tables we work with. First, the menu with color palettes is now much larger and more noticeable, and the choice of colors is more adapted to visually impaired people or those who do not perceive the differences between colors well. Then there is a new option that allows you to focus on the cell, making it easier to work with large tables.

Where it was?

Microsoft is constantly working to improve the user experience and make everyday work in Excel easier. A few years ago, the „Tell me what you want to do“ option appeared, and later its functionality was integrated into the Search field, which you can still see in the title bar of any Excel document. Search is now part of the context menu, and browsing Excel features is even easier than before…

Copying formulas

There are several ways to multiply Excel formulas: by simply copying, creating a series that multiplies values, using a variant of the Paste Special option that copies formulas… However, in everyday work, shortcuts will mean a lot to you and they will make you more productive. In the text that follows, you will find out more about such shortcuts…

Excel binary files

Since the release of Excel 2007 it has been storing data as an XML file. This is a good practice if we want to exchange spreadsheets between different platforms, or even operating systems, but when it comes to complex calculations, which contain hundreds of thousands of rows, such documents can take up a lot of disk space. This can be overcome by saving with the use of the XSLB extension. You can read about the advantages and disadvantages of this approach in the text that follows.