George Mount

Take my Copilot in Excel course for FREE, and please share it with someone who could use it! The full LinkedIn Learning course, "Excel with Copilot: AI-Driven Data Analysis," is unlocked for everyone. No account required. Over 200,000 learners have joined the course, where I cover practical ways to use Copilot to write and troubleshoot formulas, organize your data, create charts, and explore useful insights. You can even use it as a formula tutor when you'd like to understand why something works before copying it down 10,000 rows. 🙂 Start learning for free: linkedin.com/learning/excel-… And please help me spread the word! A repost or a quick message to a colleague makes a real difference. As a business owner, these shares help my teaching reach people I might never connect with otherwise. I appreciate it so much.

Musk and Zuckerberg echo Trump’s push to rebrand AI as ‘super intelligence’ on earnings calls. Others do not cnbc.com/2026/10/30/trump-te…

Paradox I've noticed in corporate training: The companies most insistent that their training needs to be completely customized to their unique workflows, systems, and business requirements are often the same ones with the tightest budgets. They want you to meet with their teams, assess their needs, develop the curriculum, and deliver something bespoke, all at something resembling a lowball off-the-shelf price. Meanwhile, the companies that actually have the budgets for fully customized training tend to be the ones that understand it often isn't economically necessary. They know when an existing course with a few relevant examples will do the job just fine. Yes, AI can help with curriculum development and customization, but truly bespoke training is still expensive. Someone has to understand the business, make instructional decisions, develop and test the exercises, and actually deliver the thing. So the organizations most capable of paying for bespoke training are often the ones most comfortable buying something off the shelf.

I always open the window shade on a flight. Even at night. Even when it's nothing but clouds. Because I want to look out at the sky and appreciate how a couple of boys from Ohio made it their bitch.

What ring of hell is this? On my seven-hour overnight flight from Kauai to Denver, I had somehow managed to get an ENTIRE EMPTY ROW to myself. The holy grail of economy travel. I could enjoy the coziness of my window seat AND get up whenever I wanted without climbing over anyone. And then some early-twentysomething punk, whose assigned seat was SOMEWHERE ELSE, decided to move into my aisle seat. WHY? WHY WOULD YOU DO THIS? There may have been other empty rows. I don't know. I didn't conduct a census of the aircraft. I realize I don't own the row. But there are certain unwritten rules of civilized society. You don't stand next to someone at an otherwise empty urinal. You don't sit at someone's table in an empty restaurant. AND YOU DON'T VOLUNTARILY OCCUPY SOMEONE'S EMPTY ROW ON AN OVERNIGHT FLIGHT. What kind of antisocial behavior is this?! WE ARE LIVING IN A SOCIETY!

Microsoft just announced more than 25 new finance skills and partner-built plugins for Copilot. Plenty of finance teams will try them. Hot take: if your team never got around to Power Query or Power Automate, I don't think Copilot is going to fix that. Power Query has been built into Excel for Windows since Excel 2016. It already handles a lot of the tedious work people now hope AI will take off their plate: combining the monthly files, cleaning the same export, refreshing the same report. Plenty of teams still do that work by hand. Not because the tool, but because nobody owned the process, nobody had time to learn it, or somebody's role was built around doing it manually. Those reasons don't go away because the new tool can chat. So before the AI pilot, I'd ask a less exciting question: what's one manual step we could have automated years ago, and why didn't we? Answer that honestly and you'll have a much better idea whether Copilot sticks, or becomes one more feature you're paying for and not using. Microsoft's announcement: microsoft.com/en-us/copilot/… Microsoft's Power Query overview and history: support.microsoft.com/en-us/… A practical Stringfest walkthrough on combining files with Power Query: stringfestanalytics.com/how-…

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There's gotta be some kind of social behavior theory at work here... AI has made it so easy to set up dashboards, automated emails and texts, and knowledge bases that I've tried using it to avoid answering the same question 20 times from my family. When does my flight land? Which plumber do I recommend? It's all in there! But of course, it's still easier to just text me and ask. Easier for them, anyway, which is probably the whole explanation. I'm trying to automate a system that, from their perspective, already works perfectly well: ask George. Gotta love them. And you can't fire your family.

I recently received an inquiry about teaching a one-day "intermediate Copilot" class. It got me thinking about what that word actually tells us... I've written about beginner, intermediate, and advanced Excel before, and I understand why people get frustrated with those labels. We don't all learn the same things in the same order. Add AI, where the same request can produce different results, and it gets even harder to draw the lines. Still, people need to choose training. For a new post, I've used one Excel reporting task to work through a possible progression: - Beginner: Calculate a variance with guidance and check a few rows yourself. - Intermediate: Adapt it to your own workbook, explain the business rules, and investigate anything that doesn't add up. - Advanced: Turn it into a monthly process that a colleague can run and check, including when the data changes. Personalization, workbook rules, and skills can all help. Sometimes, after thinking through the job, the best next step is a Power Query refresh. (I'm quite comfortable calling that progress. I've kept this article focused on Excel. The reporting work often continues into a memo, slides, or an email, which gives broader Microsoft 365 Copilot training a natural place too. What would you expect someone to know before joining an intermediate Copilot class? I worked through the examples here: stringfestanalytics.com/begi…

"Please hold these two days on your calendar while we confirm with the client." Yeah, that's called an option. In other markets, you'd pay for that. But when it's a trainer's time, you expect the option for free? There has got to be a way to solve this market inefficiency...

"I think switching between daylight saving time and standard time is just a humiliation ritual by the elite to remind us of the futility of the two-party system. They call it 'saving time' like they've accomplished something, when they're just moving things around and making our lives worse. Where's the time they saved? Who has it? How can I prove it? Bah, damn it. I can't."

One recurring Eventbrite annoyance: you postpone an event, but the standard reminder emails are still scheduled. Including "Starting in 2 hours" and "Starting Now!" You have to remember to go into another screen and delete them individually. Otherwise, people can get reminders to join an event that isn't happening, and you're left explaining the mess. Why isn't handling the reminders part of postponing the event? Come to think of it, this is one service I'd actually make a case for vibe coding yourself. For me, the big reason to use Eventbrite is access to their audience and data. But they keep that stuff so deep behind lock and key that you can't even meaningfully see or manage your own followers. If I'm already setting up my own automations and working around basic event-management problems, building my own registration setup starts to sound pretty reasonable. Especially when the part I couldn't build myself—their audience—is the part I can barely access anyway. And then they want me to pay for an upgrade?! It's hard to get excited about that when using the thing still feels like managing an eBay listing through AOL in 2002.

Microsoft Copilot for finance: Purpose-built for the way finance teams work | Microsoft Copilot Blog microsoft.com/en-us/copilot/…