Smart Skills Monthly - August 26

Smart Skills Academy's monthly download on Excel, Word, PowerPoint & Copilot - what's new, what's changed, and what's worth trying.

A NOTE FROM GEMMA

"Hello and welcome to the first issue of Smart Skills Monthly! This month Copilot took a big step from 'assistant' to 'agent' - you can now build a whole document, sheet or deck without ever leaving the chat window. Below is a quick, practical round-up of what's new in Excel, Word, PowerPoint and Copilot, plus one tip you can put to use today." 

- Gemma, Smart Skills Academy

EXCEL UPDATE

Copilot in Excel Gets Smarter Sourcing

Copilot in Excel now shows inline citations, so you can click straight through to the exact source behind any AI-generated answer. New synced connectors let you pull live data - CRM records, tickets, databases - directly into your grid, and Power BI grounding keeps figures tied to trusted, approved metrics. A new brand kit and theme design skill also auto-applies your company's colours, fonts and logo to tables and charts, and you can now choose your AI model: GPT-5.6 or Claude Opus 5.

WORD UPDATE

Track Changes Meets Copilot 

Copilot's edits in Word can now run with Track Changes switched on, so every AI suggestion is visible and easy to accept, reject or tweak - no more mystery edits. Copilot can also generate and insert an image inline while it drafts, and its citations now link to the exact paragraph in a source file rather than the whole document, making fact-checking far quicker.

POWERPOINT UPDATE

A Fresh Look, Courtesy of "PowerPoint Craft"

PowerPoint's latest update brings 13 new SmartArt layouts (including ready-made timelines and "Meet the Team" slides) and 13 new Design tab themes, plus a cleaner, single-dialog file-opening screen. On the Copilot side, it can now write, reply to and resolve comments inside your deck, pull content from public webpages as source material, and standardise fonts, sizes and bullet styles across every slide in a single click.

COPILOT CORNER

Copilot Just Became an Agent

The biggest shift this month: you can now @mention the Word, Excel or PowerPoint agent directly inside Copilot Chat and have it build a document, spreadsheet or deck for you - without opening the app at all. Try typing something like: "@Excel build me a budget tracker for a 3-month project with monthly totals." Model choice has also rolled out across Word, PowerPoint and Copilot, so you can pick between GPT-5.6 and Claude Sonnet 5 depending on the task, and Copilot Notebooks (with OneNote sync) are rolling out this month too.

QUICK TIP OF THE MONTH

The Copilot button is now fully customisable in Word, Excel and PowerPoint - you can dock it, undock it, or move it anywhere on the ribbon. Right-click the ribbon and choose "Customise the Ribbon" to put Copilot exactly where your hand already goes.