Enlarge / A pit stop during the Bahrain Formula One Grand Prix in early March evokes how the team's manager was feeling when looking at the Excel sheet that managed the car's build components. (credit: ALI HAIDER/POOL/AFP via Getty Images)

There's a new boss at a storied 47-year-old Formula 1 team, and he's eager to shake things up. He's been saying that the team is far behind its competition in technology and coordination. And Excel is a big part of it.

Starting in early 2023, Williams team principal James Vowles and chief technical officer Pat Fry started reworking the F1 team's systems for designing and building its car. It would be painful, but the pain would keep the team from falling even further behind. As they started figuring out new processes and systems, they encountered what they considered a core issue: Microsoft Excel.

The Williams car build workbook, with roughly 20,000 individual parts, was "a joke," Vowles recently told The Race . "Impossible to navigate and impossible to update." This colossal Excel file lacked information on how much each of those parts cost and the time it took to produce them, along with whether the parts were already on order. Prioritizing one car section over another, from manufacture through inspection, was impossible, Vowles suggested.

Enlarge (credit: Microsoft)

Last week , Microsoft announced that it would soon begin offering previews of Microsoft Office 2024, the next standalone perpetually licensed version of the Office suite. Like Office 2021 before it, Office 2024 will be part of Microsoft's Long-Term Servicing Channel (LTSC), which is intended for IT administrators and users who value stability and predictability over constant iteration.

But Microsoft is being clearer than ever that it would really like people to move to using Microsoft 365 subscriptions, referring to Office 2024 as "a specialty product that Microsoft has committed to maintaining for use in exceptional circumstances." The company will be increasing prices for businesses by "up to 10 percent" compared to Office 2021, a price hike that Microsoft says will "support continued innovation in this niche space." Pricing for the consumer version of Office 2024 should stay the same as it is for Office 2021.

Office 2024 will receive support and security updates for five years from its release date, which will be "later this year," along with a new LTSC release of Windows 11. The company has also committed to releasing at least one more standalone version of Office in the future. If you bought Office 2021 and you're still happy with it, you'll still get support (including security updates) until October of 2026. Support for Office 2019 ended in October 2023.

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It seems like AI large language models (LLMs) are everywhere these days due to the rise of ChatGPT . Now, a software developer named Ishan Anand has managed to cram a precursor to ChatGPT called GPT-2—originally released in 2019 after some trepidation from OpenAI—into a working Microsoft Excel spreadsheet. It's freely available and is designed to educate people about how LLMs work.

"By using a spreadsheet anyone (even non-developers) can explore and play directly with how a 'real' transformer works under the hood with minimal abstractions to get in the way," writes Anand on the official website for the sheet, which he calls "Spreadsheets-are-all-you-need." It's a nod to the 2017 research paper " Attention is All You Need " that first described the Transformer architecture that has been foundational to how LLMs work.

Anand packed GPT-2 into an XLSB Microsoft Excel binary file format, and it requires the latest version of Excel to run (but won't work on the web version). It's completely local and doesn't do any API calls to cloud AI services.

Enlarge / If this kind of thing raises your eyebrows, there's a whole lot more inside a ribbon bar for you. (credit: Anaconda)

If you’re decent in Python (or aspire to be) but don’t have the chops for advanced data work in Excel, Microsoft now offers the kind of peanut butter-and-chocolate combination that you may consider a gift. At least until it goes behind the paywall.

Microsoft's Stefan Kinnestrand, writing about “the best of both worlds for data analysis and visualization,” writes that this public preview of Python in Excel will allow spreadsheet tinkerers to “manipulate and explore data in Excel using Python plots and libraries and then use Excel's formulas, charts, and PivotTables to further refine your insights.”

Microsoft partnered with Python analytics repository Anaconda to bring libraries like Pandas, Statsmodels, and Matplotlib into Excel. Python in Excel runs on Microsoft’s cloud servers, and the company is touting the security that should offer . Python runs in isolated containers, with no access to devices, your network, or user tokens, Microsoft states. Python and Excel can only really talk to each other through limited functions—xl() and =PY()—that can only return code results, not macros, VBA code, or other data, Microsoft claims.

Enlarge / Still from a demo video showing ACT-1 performing a search on Redfin.com in a browser when asked to "find me a house." (credit: Adept)

Yesterday, California-based AI firm Adept announced Action Transformer (ACT-1) , an AI model that can perform actions in software like a human assistant when given high-level written or verbal commands. It can reportedly operate web apps and perform intelligent searches on websites while clicking, scrolling, and typing in the right fields as if it were a person using the computer.

In a demo video tweeted by Adept, the company shows someone typing, "Find me a house in Houston that works for a family of 4. My budget is 600K" into a text entry box. Upon submitting the task, ACT-1 automatically browses Redfin.com in a web browser, clicking the proper regions of the website, typing a search entry, and changing the search parameters until a matching house appears on the screen.

Another demonstration video on Adept's website shows ACT-1 operating Salesforce with prompts such as "add Max Nye at Adept as a new lead" and "log a call with James Veel saying that he's thinking about buying 100 widgets." ACT-1 then clicks the right buttons, scrolls, and fills out the proper forms to finish these tasks. Other demo videos show ACT-1 navigating Google Sheets, Craigslist, and Wikipedia through a browser.

Enlarge / Ladies and gentlemen, let's get ready to modelllllllll! (credit: FMWC )

If you watched ESPN2 during its stint last weekend as " ESPN8: The Ocho ," you may have seen some odd, meme-friendly competitions, including corgi racing, precision paper airplane tossing, and slippery stair climbing.

Or you might have seen " Excel Esports: All-Star Battle ," a tournament in which an unexpected full-column Flash Fill is announced like a 50-yard Hail Mary. It's just the latest mainstream acknowledgment of Excel as a viable, if quirky, esport, complete with down-to-the-wire tension and surprising comebacks.

The Financial Modeling World Cup (FMWC) hosts regular international competitions, both invitational and open to anyone, in which Excel pros strive to solve as many questions as possible from a complex task. You can download all three of the tasks used in last weekend's battle for free.

Yeah yeah, this looks exciting and all, but the spreadsheets are where the real action happens

There aren't many games for which built-in integration with Microsoft Excel would be a major feature whose announcement would draw literal cheers from fans. But Eve Online showed itself to be the exception when developer CCP announced coming Excel integration during its Eve Fanfest keynote this morning .

Through an official partnership with Microsoft, CCP said it is creating a JavaScript API that will allow players to "seamlessly export data from Eve Online " into the popular spreadsheet program. That "will help players access and calculate everything from profit margins to battle strategy, making day-to-day Eve operations easier to execute," the company said in a press release .

"It's not April fools; this is real," Eve Online Creative Director Bergur Finnbogason said on the Fanfest stage, receiving bemused laughter in response. "I'm not lying—we actually reached out to [Microsoft] and they were like, 'Oh my god, We love Eve !'"