Excel Canvas offers to turn your workbook into the boss's next report
The reports automatically refresh as the underlying data changes.Users need access to Copilot in Excel and can tweak reports through natural language prompts. Presumably along the lines of "Why the heck did you use that as the x-axis?" REG AD googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.display('labrador/thereg/article/desktop/b'); }); Lately, Microsoft has been relentlessly fiddling with Excel. Last week it added an opt-in feature to allow multiple values in the same cell, potentially complicating life for third-party tools that expect one value per cell.
- ▪The reports automatically refresh as the underlying data changes.Users need access to Copilot in Excel and can tweak reports through natural language prompts.
- ▪Presumably along the lines of "Why the heck did you use that as the x-axis?" REG AD googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.display('labrador/thereg/article/desktop/b'); }); Lately, Microsoft has been relentlessly fiddling with Excel.
- ▪Last week it added an opt-in feature to allow multiple values in the same cell, potentially complicating life for third-party tools that expect one value per cell.
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| Original publisher | The Register |
| Canonical URL | https://www.theregister.com/software/2026/10/02/excel-canvas-offers-to-turn-your-workbook-into-the-bosss-next-report/5300812 |
| Publication time | Fri, 02 Oct 2026 14:27:00 +0200 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-10-02T13:21:35.761Z |
| Last seen | 2026-10-02T13:21:35.761Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | 3R5KWesToBDk · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
(function() { let windowUrl = window.location.href; windowUrl = windowUrl.substring(windowUrl.indexOf('?') + 1); let messageElement = document.querySelector('.shareableMessage'); if (windowUrl && windowUrl.includes('code') && windowUrl.includes('expires')) { messageElement.style.display = 'block'; } })(); software Excel Canvas offers to turn your workbook into the boss's next report Copilot builds charts and metrics from spreadsheet data, with automatic refreshes when the numbers change Richard Speed Richard Speed MICROSOFT ECOSYSTEM REPORTER Published fri 2 Oct 2026 // 13:27 UTC READ MORE OpenAI shows three staff the door over alleged information misuse now Nvidia debuts $4,999 DGX Spark with half the RAM and storage, amid memory crunch 5 minutes ago Teen suspected of running KillSec…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at The Register.
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