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Various updates from Microsoft
What connects the ability to high-five in Teams, the inclusion of Excel in EVE Online, a new default font in Office and pricing policy for the new Microsoft AI Copilot feature? This blog!

Posted by Andy Brown on 20 July 2023

In this blog

Copilot pricing
A new default font for Office
The first video game Excel add-in

A smorgasbord of new annoucements from Microsoft!

This blog covers 3 new announcements from Microsoft (or its partners): price announcements for the Copilot add-in for Office, a new default font for Office and the first integration of Excel into an online game!

Copilot pricing

Microsoft have announced provisional pricing for Copilot, its new AI add-in for Microsoft 365 - and it's not cheap. A typical Microsoft 365 Standard licence costs about £10 a month; adding a Copilot licence to this will add an additional $30 a month to your bill. Here are a couple of links giving details:

Company	What
Microsoft	Blog post on July 18th
ArsTechnica	Summarising this blog post more readably

Copilot is currently being rolled out to 600 early adopting commercial users (companies like KPMG and Emirates); reading between the lines we would guess general roll-out is 6-12 months down the line.

Because Wise Owl have so many training accounts we have over 80 Microsoft 365 licences, despite only having 9 members of staff. I don't think we'll be incurring the additional $2,400+ monthly costs of upgrading all of our 365 licences to include Copilot any time soon!

A new default font for Office

For those who are into fonts, momentous news! Calbri has been the default font in Office since the heady days of Office 2007, but it's now being superseded by Aptos (the font formerly known as Bierstadt). Obviously these are completely different ...

Spot the difference ...

Aptos was created by Steve Matteson, who describes the font as Helvetica but with "a bit of a human touch". For those wanting to learn more, here's an excellent blog on the subject.

Confessiion: Wise Owl was founded way back in 1992 by myself and my wife Jenny (it's a family business). In the early days we would amuse ourselves by guessing the typefaces used on restaurant menus when eating out. The evenings flew by!

The first video game Excel add-in

EVE Online is a MMO (massively multiplayer online) role-playing game, in which players explore space, conduct space battles, mine space resources and build space companies. But keeping track of all your characters, resources and budgets can be time-consuming, so there's now a free Excel add-in to do this for you:

A sample screen-shot from the Excel add-in.

There's a short video showing the use of this add-in at the EVE online site.

I've never played a MMO game, but having watched the video I'm not sure I want to: managing all your people, resources and money seems to me to be almost indistinguishable from work!

Some other pages relevant to the above blog include: