Excel Copilot now supports local files (Preview): what this means for everyday users
In the Microsoft 365 Current Channel (Preview), Excel Copilot Chat now supports local Excel files, not just workbooks stored in the cloud. This is a meaningful usability improvement because many users, especially students and early-career professionals, still work primarily with datasets stored locally on their devices. Why this matters for adoption: Users can now interact with Copilot Chat while analysing local Excel files. This reduces friction for offline work, assignments, and exploratory data analysis. It makes Copilot more practical for everyday learning and productivity workflows. For users learning data analysis, reporting, or business intelligence, this update lowers the barrier to using Copilot consistently rather than only in cloud-based scenarios. I am exploring how these preview features can improve real-world adoption and learning experiences, particularly for students and early-career users who work with Excel daily.
How to view all employees in Microsoft Places?
Now that the Favorites feature has been removed and Microsoft Places only shows frequently used people from Microsoft 365 apps, is there a way to see all employees of the company (65 people) in one overview? I’m looking for a way to search this list and ideally sort it alphabetically or by department. Is this functionality planned to return, or is there an alternative way to achieve this today?
CPAi Advisors + Copilot Frontier: Accounting Meets Agent Mode
Hey all — I’m Dan, founder of CPAi Advisors, where boutique accounting meets workflow automation and Microsoft Copilot. I spent years in public company accounting, working across GL, AP/AR, reporting, and compliance — plus deep ERP integrations and technical troubleshooting. After seeing firsthand how manual and fragmented financial workflows can be, I decided to go out on my own and build something smarter: a boutique firm powered by Microsoft 365 Business Premium + Copilot. Now I’m exploring how Office Agent (Frontier) can take things further — not just chat in Word or Excel, but actually carry context across apps and orchestrate real accounting tasks. Here’s what I’m testing: Agent Mode in Excel → financial models, ledger reconciliation, anomaly detection Agent Mode in Word → client-ready reports that pull live spreadsheet data Agent Mode in Outlook → turning email threads into task lists and audit prep Cross-app orchestration → one prompt that builds a report, updates the spreadsheet, and drafts the email 💡 Focus: Copilot in accounting workflows Automating compliance & audit readiness Bridging trust in AI for financial advisory Pushing Agent Mode beyond the obvious Excited to share feedback and help shape what’s next. Let’s make accounting workflows smarter — and a little more fun. Take care & be well!
M365 Roadmap Management
Wondering if others have tips & tricks on how they stay up to date with the https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/roadmap? I find it tedious to stay on top of all the features being announced, switching launch phases, moving target dates, and so on. I was hoping to use the RSS feed in a PowerBI Dashboard or find a solution in Planner similar to syncing the Admin Centre messages, and after some quick searches online could not find an example of anyone doing something similar. I was hoping any members of this community may be able to shed some light on how they approach the roadmap site and what tools if any they use to manage the constant influx of information? TIA!
Tips/resources on managing Shared Mailboxes in New Outlook?
Hello In the New Outlook Shared categories are no longer available on a Shared mailbox. At each and every client I have they rely quite heavily on shared mailboxes for client interactions. Shared categories are used to distribute work in the team and reach consensus on who follows up. This is no longer working in the New Outlook. This makes centralized external communications via Outlook impossible. For small organisations, other software used by corporates is often seen as overkill. Teams is not an option given the fact that there are known external users and unkown users that you want to enable to reach the organisation in a simple and friendly way (Forms are not seen as customer friendly, nor Chatbots) What solutions would you suggest?Adoption Learning/Sharing Group for MS Customers
Dear all! Are you busy fighting for adoption in your company? Do you have a lot of ideas on what you could do to foster/enhance adoption? Are you constantly thinking about what else you could do to bring users closer to a bit of your amazement for technology? Do you feel you should be doing more to help your colleagues understand and use all the awesome features and possibilities your licenses is already paying for? If you answered yes to any of my questions, then let us connect and talk. I am looking to create a group for Adoption specialists, Champions, TDIs, technology evangelist or how ever we are called working in medium-big organizations that would like to come together to learn from each other and recycle, improve and get new ideas from the sharing of experiences and mistakes. We all have done our mistakes and found our gold, let us share these! I am a Transformation Manager in an big international company. It is my job to find out how to create bridges between my colleagues(aka users) and the technology we are buying from MS... it sounds simple... Anyone?I cannot recommend Teams 'apps' anymore
Rant incoming... From 'Tasks for Planner and To Do' to 'Polls' and 'Updates', these 'apps' are a mess of poor performance, missing core features, and no clear roadmap. For this reason, I cannot recommend them to clients anymore. Just today, a coworker posted a poll using the 'Polls' app that contained some mistakes. "No problem, just edit it" I told him. Today I learned that the Polls app does NOT have an EDIT or DELETE function. He then tried to delete the poll from the Forms web app (where they are READ-ONLY), but that doesn't remove it from the channel it was posted. So this is, to be blunt - bad quality assurance by Microsoft. This product should not have been released to the millions of daily users that depend on them to get things done. And before it gets said - yes, I've submitted feedback. However, we shouldn't NEED to ask for such basic functionality. That is just a recent example. Has anyone tried or recommended the 'Updates' app here? I've been testing it for the past several weeks and find it so slow it's unusable. It's a non-starter. The Tasks for Planner and To Do app has been left incomplete and in a state of limbo. Not a very inspiring product that seemed to be forgotten about shortly after its release. That's the end of my rant. Thanks for tuning in.Launching a New Org Intranet Featuring Yammer/VE for Org News
Has anyone recently explored launching a SharePoint intranet using Yammer as core component for news and sharing resources? I'm working on a project where the client is starting with a single communication home site that will be managed by only a handful of staff for an organization of a few hundred. There are no plans to expand this into additional sites. We're still assessing the scope and scale of the site content, but if there is a need to publish a LOT of internal content, it may be too much for them to manage. That's why I'm considering Yammer to manage the majority of org news. Even a single community would allow multiple committees and departments to share their news and resources to a wide audience. All of which would be embedded into the home site. There are several other benefits, but I'm curious to know if anyone here as already walked this path. Happy to hear your experiences and your advice for a SharePoint/Yammer hybrid home site.
