Azure Skilling at Microsoft Ignite 2025
The energy at Microsoft Ignite was unmistakable. Developers, architects, and technical decision-makers converged in San Francisco to explore the latest innovations in cloud technology, AI applications, and data platforms. Beyond the keynotes and product announcements was something even more valuable: an integrated skilling ecosystem designed to transform how you build with Azure. This year Azure Skilling at Microsoft Ignite 2025 brought together distinct learning experiences, over 150+ hands-on labs, and multiple pathways to industry-recognized credentials—all designed to help you master skills that matter most in today's AI-driven cloud landscape. Just Launched at Ignite Microsoft Ignite 2025 offered an exceptional array of learning opportunities, each designed to meet developers anywhere on the skilling journey. Whether you joined us in-person or on-demand in the virtual experience, multiple touchpoints are available to deepen your Azure expertise. Ignite 2025 is in the books, but you can still engage with the latest Microsoft skilling opportunities, including: The Azure Skills Challenge provides a gamified learning experience that lets you compete while completing task-based achievements across Azure's most critical technologies. These challenges aren't just about badges and bragging rights—they're carefully designed to help you advance technical skills and prepare for Microsoft role-based certifications. The competitive element adds urgency and motivation, turning learning into an engaging race against the clock and your peers. For those seeking structured guidance, Plans on Learn offer curated sets of content designed to help you achieve specific learning outcomes. These carefully assembled learning journeys include built-in milestones, progress tracking, and optional email reminders to keep you on track. Each plan represents 12-15 hours of focused learning, taking you from concept to capability in areas like AI application development, data platform modernization, or infrastructure optimization. The Microsoft Reactor Azure Skilling Series, running December 3-11, brings skilling to life through engaging video content, mixing regular programming with special Ignite-specific episodes. This series will deliver technical readiness and programming guidance in a livestream presentation that's more digestible than traditional documentation. Whether you're catching episodes live with interactive Q&A or watching on-demand later, you’ll get world-class instruction that makes complex topics approachable. Beyond Ignite: Your Continuous Learning Journey Here's the critical insight that separates Ignite attendees who transform their careers from those who simply collect swag: the real learning begins after the event ends. Microsoft Ignite is your launchpad, not your destination. Every module you start, every lab you complete, and every challenge you tackle connects to a comprehensive learning ecosystem on Microsoft Learn that's available 24/7, 365 days a year. Think of Ignite as your intensive immersion experience—the moment when you gain context, build momentum, and identify the skills that will have the biggest impact on your work. What you do in the weeks and months following determines whether that momentum compounds into career-defining expertise or dissipates into business as usual. For those targeting career advancement through formal credentials, Microsoft Certifications, Applied Skills and AI Skills Navigator, provide globally recognized validation of your expertise. Applied Skills focus on scenario-based competencies, demonstrating that you can build and deploy solutions, not simply answer theoretical questions. Certifications cover role-based scenarios for developers, data engineers, AI engineers, and solution architects. The assessment experiences include performance-based testing in dedicated Azure tenants where you complete real configuration and development tasks. And finally, the NEW AI Skills Navigator is an agentic learning space, bringing together AI-powered skilling experiences and credentials in a single, unified experience with Microsoft, LinkedIn Learning and GitHub – all in one spot Why This Matters: The Competitive Context The cloud skills race is intensifying. While our competitors offer robust training and content, Microsoft's differentiation comes not from having more content—though our 1.4 million module completions last fiscal year and 35,000+ certifications awarded speak to scale—but from integration of services to orchestrate workflows. Only Microsoft offers a truly unified ecosystem where GitHub Copilot accelerates your development, Azure AI services power your applications, and Azure platform services deploy and scale your solutions—all backed by integrated skilling content that teaches you to maximize this connected experience. When you continue your learning journey after Ignite, you're not just accumulating technical knowledge. You're developing fluency in an integrated development environment that no competitor can replicate. You're learning to leverage AI-powered development tools, cloud-native architectures, and enterprise-grade security in ways that compound each other's value. This unified expertise is what transforms individual developers into force-multipliers for their organizations. Start Now, Build Momentum, Never Stop Microsoft Ignite 2025 offered the chance to compress months of learning into days of intensive, hands-on experience, but you can still take part through the on-demand videos, the Global Ignite Skills Challenge, visiting the GitHub repos for the /Ignite25 labs, the Reactor Azure Skilling Series, and the curated Plans on Learn provide multiple entry points regardless of your current skill level or preferred learning style. But remember: the developers who extract the most value from Ignite are those who treat the event as the beginning, not the culmination, of their learning journey. They join hackathons, contribute to GitHub repositories, and engage with the Azure community on Discord and technical forums. The question isn't whether you'll learn something valuable from Microsoft Ignite 2025-that's guaranteed. The question is whether you'll convert that learning into sustained momentum that compounds over months and years into career-defining expertise. The ecosystem is here. The content is ready. Your skilling journey doesn't end when Ignite does—it accelerates.Microsoft Ignite 2025: The Dawn of the AI-Agent Era
Microsoft Ignite 2025 wasn’t just another tech conference — it was a redefinition of the modern workplace. Instead of incremental upgrades and predictable product updates, Microsoft used the event to signal the beginning of a new era: an agent-driven, AI-first workplace where intelligent copilots, governed automation, and deeply connected data systems form the backbone of how organizations operate. From massive transformations in Microsoft 365 to the emergence of fully governed AI agents with their own identities, Ignite 2025 delivered a bold roadmap. In this blog, we unpack the biggest announcements and explore why they matter — not just for IT leaders or developers, but for anyone who uses technology to get work done. https://dellenny.com/microsoft-ignite-2025-the-dawn-of-the-ai-agent-era/Analyzing Sales Data with Simple Natural Language Prompts in Copilot Excel
In today’s fast-paced business world, being able to efficiently analyze sales data is crucial for making informed decisions. Traditionally, this required advanced spreadsheet skills, experience with formulas, or even specialized data analysis tools. But with the introduction of Copilot in Excel, anyone—from beginner to expert—can now analyze data using simple natural language prompts. Instead of writing complex formulas or constructing pivot tables manually, users can simply type a question like, “Show me total revenue by region,” and Copilot does the heavy lifting. This transformation signals a major shift in how organizations and individuals work with spreadsheets. It gives non-technical users the ability to uncover insights that were previously either time-consuming or out of reach. In this blog, we’ll explore how Copilot in Excel works, how to use it for sales analysis, and why this new approach is a game-changer for data-driven decision making. https://dellenny.com/analyzing-sales-data-with-simple-natural-language-prompts-in-copilot-excel/How to Generate Formulas Using Copilot in Excel
In recent years, artificial intelligence has transformed the way we work in productivity tools, and Microsoft Excel is no exception. With the introduction of Copilot in Microsoft 365, users can now generate formulas, automate workflows, and analyze data with natural language commands. Instead of struggling to remember complex syntax or nested functions, Copilot acts as your intelligent assistant—interpreting your requests and building formulas for you. Whether you’re a beginner who always forgets how VLOOKUP works or a power user wanting to prototype formulas faster, Copilot offers an intuitive way to work smarter in Excel. In this guide, we’ll walk through how to generate formulas using Copilot in Excel, step-by-step, along with examples and tips on getting the best results. https://dellenny.com/how-to-generate-formulas-using-copilot-in-excel/Step-by-Step: Your First Data Analysis with Copilot in Excel
Data analysis has traditionally required a combination of technical skills, domain knowledge, and familiarity with complex Excel formulas. Today, Microsoft Copilot in Excel makes the process faster, more intuitive, and more approachable—even for beginners. Copilot works as an AI-powered assistant within Excel, helping you analyze spreadsheets, clean messy data, create insights, and build visualizations using natural language prompts. Whether you are new to data analysis or looking for smarter ways to explore information, this guide walks you through performing your first analysis using Copilot in Excel, step by step. https://dellenny.com/step-by-step-your-first-data-analysis-with-copilot-in-excel/Goodbye, Hours of Chart-Making: Hello, Copilot
Taking a neat table of numbers and turning it into a beautiful, insightful chart can feel like a chore. You know, clicking through menus, tweaking axis labels, and hoping you picked the right type of chart to tell your data’s story. It’s time-consuming, and for many people, it’s a stumbling block on the road to getting real value from their data. What if you could skip all that manual work? What if you could simply talk to your data tool and have it instantly whip up the perfect bar graph, line chart, or scatter plot? It’s a powerful change in how we interact with spreadsheets and data analysis platforms. This blog post will dive into how Copilot can automatically generate charts and graphs, making you a data visualization superhero with almost zero effort. https://dellenny.com/goodbye-hours-of-chart-making-hello-copilot/Stop Guessing Your Guide to Asking Copilot Questions About Your Spreadsheets
Let’s be honest—how many times have you opened an enormous Excel file and instantly felt your brain shut down a little? You know the insights are in there somewhere… the trend that matters, the weird outlier, the formula that will finally make the numbers make sense. But digging them out can feel like you need a data science degree—and two quiet hours with no interruptions. I’ve been there too. I’ve spent more mornings than I’d like to admit wrestling with complex VLOOKUPs or manually sorting through hundreds of comments. Exhausting, right? https://dellenny.com/stop-guessing-your-guide-to-asking-copilot-questions-about-your-spreadsheets/How to Measure ROI from Copilot Deployment
“So, you’ve rolled out Copilot. Now what?” That’s the question every IT leader and business owner asks after the initial excitement fades. Sure, Copilot feels like magic—automating tasks, summarizing meetings, and even drafting emails—but how do you prove it’s more than a shiny new tool? How do you measure its real return on investment (ROI)? Let’s break it down in a way that’s practical, relatable, and yes, human. https://dellenny.com/how-to-measure-roi-from-copilot-deployment/
