It’s almost the end of June, and there’s a long weekend coming up! To celebrate, let’s take a look at some of the spreadsheet news from the past month. Here are 3 stories that caught my eye, and let me know if there was other noteworthy news that I missed!
EVE Online
Do you play EVE Online? It’s a role-playing game, where things can get so complicated that people use Excel to keep track of their activities.
Now that will be much easier to do, because Microsoft and CCP Games just released a free add-in to integrate Excel with EVE Online.
It’s the first and only game to have Excel data integration!
Read the details on the game’s official website, and get the free Excel add-in.
Create Spreadsheets with Google Bard
Google announced improvements to its AI chatbot, Bard, and now you can export tables to Google Sheets.
For example, I could enter this prompt:
- Please make a table to compare the populations of all Canadian provinces and territories
When Bard finishes the table:
- Check the table, to see if it looks okay – if not, try rewording your prompt
- Next, click the Export to Sheets button.
- Then, at the bottom left of the Bard window, click the Open Sheets link, to see your new spreadsheet.
Unfortunately, Bard isn’t available in Canada yet, so I’ll have to make my spreadsheets the old-fashioned way!
Life in a Spreadsheet
Some days, it can feel like you’re living in a spreadsheet! But have you ever considered graphing your life in a spreadsheet?
Emmett Shear, a co-founder of Twitch, is turning 40 soon, and tweeted the spreadsheet version of his life so far. He also posted a link where you can download your own copy of the spreadsheet, so that’s what I did!
Here’s a small section of Emmett’s life graph.
I was going to deduct points for the merged cells in the Month heading row, but then I noticed the merged cells in column A. It has two features that aren’t available in Excel:
- When selected, the merged cell range appears in the name box
- The merged cell gets vertical and horizontal scroll bars if the entire cell isn’t visible
I try to avoid merged cells, but if people insist on using them, these features seem helpful!
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Spreadsheets in the News 2023-06-29
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