Coming November: CoPilot in Excel

Come November first, CoPilot will be coming to Excel (if not the other Microsoft products) for those corporations that pay for certain licenses: I believe E3, E5 and Business Premium. For single individuals or for homeowners, I don’t think CoPilot will be coming for your machine.

Here’s my reasoning for why that is so: my understanding is that CoPilot is designed to gather requisition materials you need for whatever piece of work you are engaged in. Maybe you need to find something in an email to include in a report or you need to find a “paper” or “graph” to include in your report, analysis or presentation. It can take notes for you in Teams if you do not go to a Teams meeting. It might even, if you are given permission, find information in other people’s folders, Word, Excel to include in your work.

People doing stuff at home (I’m not talking remote work) for their own personal pleasure are not going to be doing work stuff like in a regular company. CoPilot is more for collaboration in companies.

That is my meager understanding of how CoPilot could potentially work.

This should be interesting. Microsoft has really upped their game and been producing new “innovations” for their customers to try out. It can be difficult to keep up with the changes. I have to look to YouTube creators to help me figure out the new stuff since they generally receive notice and possibly access to the new features before the rest of the world. So, I look to them to tell me what I should know is coming down the pike.

Roughly two weeks from now are big changes.

I haven’t felt like writing this post – not because I’m uninterested in this new CoPilot thing – but because I don’t know enough to elaborate on it. All I know is that it is coming November 1st. I’ll have to watch and wait and see what the responses are.

But also, the world events have been my focus for the last two weeks. Hamas’ attack on Israel was horrible and the horrifying details of their brutality seem to be still coming out.

Now I’m watching the world-wide response to that attack and the corresponding war unfolding in the Gaza Strip. The psychopathy/sociopathy of the Hamas really becomes apparent when you realize that they based their offices or weaponry right in the middle of civilian buildings and living quarters, such as under hospitals or schools.

This is Israel’s dilemma: how do you extirpate the Hamas, so they can never do this again, without harming the Palestinian civilians? I agree with annihilating the Hamas, especially their leadership and their infrastructure, but I don’t see how Israel can do that. The civilians are in the middle. That is the big conundrum. I have heard no good answer for that.

The civilians: are they for Hamas or what? Well, about 50% are under 19 years old so we can’t ascribe choice to them because they are too young to be making choices of whom to support. I gather that there are Palestinians who would be happy to see the Hamas gone, but I don’t know if that is the majority or the minority, But still, we have to assume that as long as they don’t partake in the attacks, then they should be regarded as civilians.

Granted, the civilians are a pool of potential terrorist wanna-be’s; however, we don’t know who, so we have to treat them as civilians. To me, an analogy would be a population of people are a source of murderer wanna-be’s but we don’t jail all of them. We only jail them once they have done the deed and have been convicted as a murderer, not before.

This is really hard for Israel to do because the country is surrounded by other countries that want to “wipe” them out. The history of the Holocaust is still within the world’s, or maybe just Western civilization’s, memory banks, so any attacks bring back the horrors of WWII. There is also rising antisemitism around the world, so that weighs on them and probably makes them more “trigger” happy.

One thing Israel may have to do after the war – if they successfully get rid of the Hamas – is assess their historical treatment of the Palestinian people. In the last decade, probably just before the Covid era, I had read a few articles about Israel’s ongoing battles with the Palestinians. I was left with the disconcerting impression that the Israelis might have been too oppressive and might have been killing people when they shouldn’t have. I don’t follow these things too closely – largely because the problems seem too intractable – so I may not have all of the context in which to assess Israel’s treatment of its protesting Palestinians. But those articles left me concerned.

If Israel has been maltreating the Palestinians, especially when they protest, then Israel needs to look for ways to change this for the better. Maltreatment, if there are any, could be generating an ongoing pool of Hamas recruits within the population. You want to shut that down.

Around the world, there is talk that the Palestinians are oppressed so when Hamas attacked, the Arab world and Palestinians cheered. Even in the US, there are some people (the extreme left) rooting for the Hamas, which is execrable. Even some college students have put out statements that Israel is 100% responsible for the attack or they stand with the Palestinians. As an outcome, some students had their job offers rescinded because most corporations were aghast at the cheering for the Hamas or the proclamation that Israel was 100% responsible.

The attack was animalistic and there is no justification for that attack. Cheering for Hamas is a no-no and no, Israel is not responsible.

But we now have some internal divisions around those who empathize with the Palestinians’ plight versus those who understand Israel’s need to go after the Hamas. Both Palestinians and the Israelis have their points and there appears to be no easy way to thread the needle, especially since the Hamas are using the Palestinians as a shield, frustrating Israel’s ability to hunt them down.

Israel needs to defend themselves; there is no way around that, but we also need to consider the Palestinians.

On top of the wars (including Ukraine-Russia war) and the internal divisions regarding support for the Palestinians versus support for Israel, we also have the drama of the House chaos precipitated by Matt Gaetz. We don’t have a Speaker now, which is not good for actions on providing humanitarian aid to Israel, the Gazans, and Ukraine. We also have a funding the government deadline of November 17. Will the House being able to find a Speaker that will be reasonable and acceptable to the Democrats and the Republican moderates (leaving out the Republican extremists and possibly the Democrat extremists)? As long as the House has no Speaker, Congress can’t do anything and we run the risk of the government shutting down, with cascading adverse economic impacts on the people and businesses.

Man, the last few months of this year and the next year looks to be a roller coaster. It’s going to be terrible.

Okay, that was more than the first piece – CoPilot in Excel – so you can see that these two topics (Israel/Hamas war and the House Speaker drama) weigh on my mind. I’m trying to process these events. Hopefully, I will get this out of my system and I can return to writing about my usual stuff on Excel, capitalism/finance, climate change.

Enough venting stuff off my chest.