Auto-Reschedule Conflicting Meetings with Copilot in Outlook

If you have a paid Microsoft 365 Copilot license, there's a genuinely useful new calendar feature in Outlook: automatic meeting rescheduling. When a conflict arises, Copilot detects it and moves the meeting for you — no manual back-and-forth required. Here's exactly how to set it

How to Add Checkboxes in Excel with Claude AI (and Count Them with COUNTIF)

I wanted to see whether Claude inside Microsoft Excel could handle something visual instead of a formula: adding a column of real, clickable checkboxes. One short prompt, no fiddling with Form Controls — that was the test. Here's how it went, plus the manual fallback and the formula I

Microsoft Teams Now Has a Muted Chat Section: How to Enable, Use, and Disable It

Microsoft Teams just added a new Muted section to the chat list that automatically groups your muted meeting chats. Here's how to turn it on, how it behaves, and the one limitation to know about.

Find and Remove Duplicates in Excel: 3 Methods with UNIQUE, VSTACK, and TEXTJOIN

Finding duplicates, highlighting them, and removing them is something I do all the time in Excel. There's no single best tool for the job — the right approach depends on whether your data has a unique identifier, whether you need to compare one list or two, and whether you

Excel Conditional Formatting: Highlight Rows Where Spend Goes Over Budget

Use a formula-based conditional formatting rule with a mixed reference to highlight every row where the spend column exceeds the budget column.

How to Use Claude in Excel to Clean Messy Data (Step-by-Step Walkthrough)

I wanted to see how well Claude in Excel can actually clean data — not just a row or two, but a genuinely messy spreadsheet with broken dates, inconsistent states, extra spaces everywhere, dollar signs glued to text, and possible duplicates lurking in the rows. So I built a fictitious order

How to Use Microsoft 365 Copilot Cowork to Build Word Docs, PowerPoint Decks, and Outlook Emails in One Prompt

Microsoft Copilot Cowork is the most exciting addition to Microsoft 365 Copilot I have used in a while. It is a multi-step agent that works across Outlook, Word, PowerPoint, and your other apps at the same time — give it one prompt and it can search your mailbox, build deliverables

How to Use the Copilot Legal Agent to Redline Documents in Word

Microsoft Copilot in Word has a great new feature that just rolled out: the Legal Agent. It can review a contract, leave clause-level comments, and apply insertions and deletions with track changes — all from a prompt inside Word. I am not an attorney, so consider this a demo of

Excel Copilot Got 3 Updates: New Icon Location, Preview Mode & Anthropic Claude Models

Microsoft Copilot in Excel just picked up three updates I think you'll want to know about. I caught these on Saturday, May 2nd, 2026, and they change how I use Copilot day to day. Let's walk through each one. Update 1: The Copilot Icon Moved Out

APC Conference - Sep 2026 - Chris Menard's Full Schedule

September 13-16, 2026 in Nashville, TN

Claude in Excel: Cross-Sheet XLOOKUP and Building a Data-Validated HR Spreadsheet from Scratch

Two real tests of the Claude add-in for Excel: a cross-sheet XLOOKUP profit calculation, and building an HR spreadsheet from scratch with data validation dropdowns, hidden source lists, and dynamic tables.

April 2026 Blog Roundup: Microsoft 365 Copilot, Teams, Excel, and Word

Chris Menard - Microsoft MVP