EXCEL 101 from an ex-investment banker

I used to work in investment banking and I started this Excel series to share the tips and tricks that helped me survive corporate life. But now that we have AI, it's built into Excel. The question is, when is it better to do things yourself and when should you let AI handle it? Let's say your manager asks you to turn this spreadsheet into a revenue versus profit margin chart for your presentation. Here's how I would do it the traditional Excel way: 1. Make pivot table. First, select all your data and insert a pivot table. Drag month into rows and revenue into values. For profit margin, create a calculated field using profit divided by revenue. So you're calculating the true margin. Then right click on the month and select group and group by quarters. Your pivot table is ready. Copy and paste as values. This will give you a clean static table so that it's easier to chart and present. 5. Create Combination Chart. Select the summarized data and under Insert, select Charts, then Combination Chart. I'm going to check off secondary axis for profit margin. And that's it. Same data, same results, very different workflows. Now try the same thing with Copilot in Excel. All I have to do is type in this prompt: Create a combination bar and line chart that shows quarter over quarter, revenue vs. profit margin with revenue in bar chart, and profit margin as line. And a combination chart is generating. Now I'll prompt it to match the brand colors similar to McDonald's - red and yellow-gold. And that's it. Same data, same results, very different workflows. So the question now is, what would you prioritize learning for work? Knowing how to build this chart in Excel yourself, or knowing how to use Copilot in Excel to get the right outputs faster?