Smart Skills Monthly - October 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

"This month's headline is a big one: for the first time in its 40-year history, an Excel cell can hold more than one value. Below is your 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

One Cell, Many Values

An Excel cell can now hold a list of separate values. Picture a task with three owners: instead of typing “Sarah, Tom, Priya” as one block of text, a List keeps all three in one cell while Excel treats each as a separate item, so you can still filter for Tom. Try Insert > List (or Ctrl+J).

Not the same as a drop-down. Data validation lets you pick one value from a menu. A List stores several values in one cell. New functions FLATTEN, HAS, HASANY and HASALL help you work with them.

Before you dive in: it's Beta Channel only on Windows and Mac, and tools like PivotTables, charts and conditional formatting can't fully use these cells yet, so keep it out of shared workbooks for now.

WORD UPDATE

Copilot Moves One Click Closer

You no longer need to open the Copilot pane to ask for help. A new prompt box now sits on the Copilot button itself, so you can type or dictate a request straight away and stay in your document. It's a small change, but it removes a step you'd otherwise repeat dozens of times a day.

It gets smarter when you highlight text, too. Select a paragraph and a Copilot box appears right next to it, ready for prompts like “make this more concise” or “turn this into bullet points”. It's rolling out now on Windows, Mac and the web, and should reach everyone with a Microsoft 365 Copilot licence by the end of December. The same prompt box is coming to PowerPoint and Excel too (see PowerPoint below).

POWERPOINT UPDATE

Talk Through Your Slides

Coming in October is real-time voice chat with Copilot. Instead of typing, you'll be able to talk to Copilot out loud and have a back-and-forth conversation about the presentation in front of you. Ask it to explain a slide, sum up the key points or help you work out what's missing, all without touching the keyboard. Great for rehearsing.

Microsoft pulled it back earlier for improvements, and it's now due in October on desktop and the web, for Word too. PowerPoint also gets the new Copilot prompt box (see Word above), so you can ask for help without opening the Copilot pane.

COPILOT CORNER

Choose Your AI

Copilot isn't one single AI. Behind the scenes it runs on models from different companies, and Microsoft is now letting you choose which one does the work. In Word, Excel and PowerPoint, users can pick between OpenAI's GPT, Anthropic's Claude and, newly added, Grok, made by Elon Musk's AI company SpaceXAI.

Before you go looking for it: Grok is in early preview, needs an admin to switch it on, and isn't available in the UK or EU yet. The real story is the choice itself: the model you pick affects where your data is processed, so if you handle sensitive information, ask your IT team which models are switched on and why.

QUICK TIP OF THE MONTH

Press Ctrl+T to turn any block of data into an Excel Table. You get filters, banded rows and formulas that fill down automatically, and Copilot works far better with tables.