50 Excel Hacks That Make Spreadsheets Work For You
Most Excel users waste hours on tasks that take experts minutes. The difference is not talent. It is knowing the right shortcuts.
These 50 Excel hacks from Kenji Explains cover the functions, formulas, and workflows that make spreadsheets work for you instead of against you.
Each one comes with step-by-step instructions and ready-to-use templates. Subscribe to Marketing Against the Grain and get all 50 free.
Here's what you'll get:
Time-saving shortcuts that eliminate the most common formula frustrations
Interface essentials most users never discover on their own
Game-changing functions for data analysis, automation, and visualization
Guided practice template so you can apply every hack immediately
The people who are fast in Excel are not smarter. They just stopped fighting the tool.
Get 50 Excel Hacks free when you subscribe to Marketing Against the Grain today.
TODAY IN AI
1 Alibaba is raising $10.2 billion for AI investments while widely releasing a new model that turns nearly any input into a 30-second video.
The Chinese e-commerce giant announced plans to issue $10.2B in new shares, with all proceeds going toward AI investments. Its stock sank on the news. Alibaba also expanded access to Wan 3.0, a new model that can generate clips up to 30 seconds long from nearly any input: text, video, documents, spreadsheets, slides, or webpages. Try it here. Raising capital and shipping a widely-available product in the same news cycle is a specific kind of signal: the company is betting investors will read the release as proof the spending is already working, not just a promise that it will.
2 Taiwan indicted nine people, including an Nvidia senior manager, for allegedly smuggling US-controlled AI servers into China.
An Nvidia senior manager, two SMCI employees, and six other defendants have been indicted for allegedly concealing illegal shipments of US-controlled AI servers into China, violating US export controls. The primary charges were breach of trust and document forgery, with no full names released yet. Read the full story.
3 SpaceXAI is sending its first orbital AI compute system into space in late 2027, adopting Nvidia's Vera CPU to power the mission.
SpaceXAI is adopting Nvidia's Vera CPU cluster to power its AI ambitions, including a space-optimized Vera system that will ride aboard SpaceX's Starmind AI satellites into orbit late next year. The announcement lands just days before Nvidia's potentially market-moving earnings report this Wednesday, which puts fresh attention on the company's roadmap at a genuinely consequential moment for how investors price it.
FROM THE FRONTIER
Agent adoption is slower than expected. Companies actually pulling it off share three specific habits.
The holdup, according to Altman. Agents are taking longer than expected to get hired. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman blamed "economic inertia" for the delay, saying people are generally just resistant to change. That is likely true. It is also not the whole story.
The security problem nobody's rushing past. Today's top models can handle more autonomy than ever: analyzing scenarios, making strategic decisions, interacting with other systems. But as their capabilities grow, so do the consequences of a failure. With 66% of companies citing security risk as their top concern, AI still seems to be waiting on the green light from corporate risk teams rather than the technology itself.
Going niche, not broad. The growing issue is designing agent workflows that can withstand scrutiny from risk, legal, and compliance teams. Companies doing this successfully share three specific traits: swapping end-to-end workflows for single-responsibility agents with a smaller scope of work, requiring agents to leave a written log of every decision and action, and adding human review checkpoints before an agent executes any high-stakes action.
The upside of the slowdown. If agent rollout really is slower than the hype suggested, that just means opportunity still abounds for companies able to design around the risk constraints and move quickly while others wait. The bottleneck is not a capability gap. It is a trust gap, and trust gaps get closed by companies willing to build the guardrails first rather than wait for someone else to prove it is safe.
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IN THE KNOW
What people are actually watching and sharing
📚 Bookmark worthy. Josh Kushner, founder of the $65B investment firm Thrive Capital, called AI the "most important tech paradigm" of our lifetimes in his first-ever letter to investors. The letter offers a rare window into how smart money is investing in AI (11,000 bookmarks).
🍿 Video memes. One Redditor turned the Disaster Girl meme into a 20-second clip using Codex and a surprisingly complex five-step prompting process. View the prompts and clip.
✏ Claude skill. A new Claude skill has grown popular among Anthropic's own employees: ELI5. It explains any topic using big pictures and minimal words. Learn how it works in this viral post that got 19,000 bookmarks.
💻 Work in 2026. A viral video shows a startup employee unboxing MacBook after MacBook to build custom server racks. The internet is divided on whether it is the future of work or a case of AI psychosis (2.5M views).
PROMPT STATION
Design an agent workflow that survives compliance review
You are an AI governance consultant helping me redesign a workflow for agent automation so it can survive review from risk, legal, and compliance teams.
The workflow: [DESCRIBE THE END-TO-END PROCESS YOU WANT TO AUTOMATE] What's currently high-stakes about it: [WHAT COULD GO WRONG IF THE AGENT MAKES A MISTAKE] Who would need to approve this internally: [RISK/LEGAL/COMPLIANCE/OTHER STAKEHOLDERS]
Break this workflow into single-responsibility agent steps rather than one end-to-end agent. For each step, specify: what decision or log entry it must produce for an audit trail, whether it needs a human checkpoint before executing, and why. Flag any part of the original workflow that is too broad in scope to pass a compliance review as designed, and propose the narrower version that would.