Excel Automations to Save Hours with Microsoft Copilot & Python the easy way with David Fortin

Welcome to the Future Finance show where we talk about treasury management on bars.

I think we're in a crazy era right now and Copilot is part of it.

Tell me where you think Copilot is now and then where you think it's going to go long term right now.

Where it is to help most people that don't know much about Excel and you can actually ask questions to it, but.

David Fortin is a CPA 2024 Microsoft MVP and the creator of Piggy bank accountant on YouTube. After helping a SaaS startup raise $30 million and exit for hundreds of millions, he now teaches Excel and Microsoft Copilot with a unique blend of clarity, energy and fun.

I think it's a little bit dangerous as well because if you don't know Biden, it generates some codes for you, but it still opens the door at learning more.

So when you think of finance people, where do you think they should be? Trying to use copilot?

It's so powerful term that you are brand new in fbna.

How are you going to use co copilot?

I've been using ChatGPT. I've been using Microsoft CO pilot. Is it 100% reliable? No. Can it save you a lot of time?

Future Finance is brought to you by qflow AI, the strategic finance platform solving the toughest part of Planning and analysis. B2B revenue align cells. Marketing and finance seamlessly speed up decision making and lock in accountability with qflow AI. Welcome to Future Finance. This week we're thrilled to be joined by David 14 on the show. David, welcome.

Hi. Thank you for having me. Hi Paul. Hi Glenn.

Hey, good to see you again.

Hopefully we'll get you to speak some French at some point and have a little fun, but a little bit about David. See, there you go. David is a chartered professional accountant and we didn't hold that against him. We still brought him on the show and a 2024 Microsoft MVP Most Value Professional. He runs Piggybake Accountant, a YouTube channel where he shares practical insights on Excel and Microsoft Copilot. With a background in FP&A for a SaaS startup, David was instrumental in raising 30 million in VC funding. He was able to play a key role in the company's successful exit, valued at hundreds of millions. Known for his dynamic and energetic personality, David is all about helping people, which he does through his online courses on Excel and copilot@courses.davidpba.com what sets David apart is his ability to make learning fun and engaging, bringing a unique energy to his Videos that resonates with his audience. Did I capture it, David?

Yeah, I think you got this right. Thank you so much. That's such a nice way to get introduced. I can't stop smiling when you're saying all these nice stuff. Right.

I like it all. True. And the best part is when I do it, I'm able to read nice.

Wait a minute. Who's that about? I was going to say you did leave off the most important reason that we were having David on. Paul and I did a analysis of our listening audience and we found that we resonate most with, with octogenarians. I don't know what it is. It's a we. And, but we thought we need a bridge to the younger people. I can see all the gray in, in Paul's beard. I've recently had an incident where trying to dye my beard, I had an allergic reaction. Ended up in the emergency room. So beard dye wasn't going to be the way we were going to reach the young people. So, and we thought, who's hippest, coolest young dude we know? And, and, and Paul said, David. And I think it was just because you speak French, though he was, you know, he liked the polyglot thing pretty much.

I mean, he knows more than just four letter words that are French. So I figured we got to bring him on and bring down the average age of our audience. David, you know, Glenn and I are both, we're on the downhill slide. Whether we like to admit it or not. You're still climbing the mountain. So we figured we'd bring in some age to balance out these old, old farts here.

All good. Love it. Love it.

All right. And, and anyone who didn't understand the joke about reading Glenn Klang before the start of the show that he can't read.

So I, I mean, I read okay. Not, not well, though.

Yeah.

Mr.

I've written multiple books. And what, what's behind you? Hundreds of.

They're all AI. They're all AI written. They're all.

Speaking of AI. We know that's a big thing David likes to talk about. But before, before we jump into the AI, Last year you were recognized as a Microsoft mvp. I know. For some of the work you've done in Copilot and also Microsoft Excel. Can you talk about what that experience has been like? Tell us a little bit about that. It's been what, eight months now?

Yeah, it was roughly in August and now we're in April. So, August of 2024. Now we're April 25th. So. Yeah, it's, it's been really nice, you know, for these who don't know what a Microsoft MVP is. It's a way to recognize people like me, like you, you know, that, that actually help the community with a Microsoft product, whatever the product. So there are different categories. I'm Microsoft Excel mvp. So I started doing videos on Microsoft Excel and I'm doing a little bit more on Copilot since, you know, it came out and you know, Excel is very saturated online. I was like, I think I can help people with Copilot. So basically Microsoft found my videos on YouTube, copilot videos, and they wanted some feedback. So they reached out directly to me on LinkedIn, which I think is kind of cool. You know, you just get discovered with, you know, this video had probably 500 views, which is probably nothing for most of all the channels out there. And, and they reached out and they were like, oh, we like your vibe. And you know, and then someone nominated me MVP because you have to be nominated. Then you apply a form, you know, and then they greenlight you or not. So it's been really great, you know, on the marketing side of thing, you know, it's, it's really great. Do you buy a course from a CPA that is a course on Excel or you buy a course from a Microsoft mvp, right? You buy a course for Microsoft mvp and especially if it's like Excel for accountants and you have both. Right. So just getting here but you know, it's, it's been really nice. It's a lot of attention, you know, which I didn't think I would get that early in the journey, but it's been really great. Lots of discussions with Microsoft as well. I had to visit the Microsoft HQ lately headquarters in Redmond in the United States. So that was super cool. All these experience have been really great. All these programs that we can, you know, be part of, some of them are on their NDA. So I don't want to breach the NDA here. But yeah, it's been a really, really nice journey. And you know, it's just these three letters that lots of people don't know what it means, but it's a lot of work, but it's a great recognition from actually the company that helps me with my living. You know, they don't pay you to be mvp, but they pay you in like visibility and you know, they help you push your stuff. And so it's been, it's been quite a great, great thing for me that happened. And maybe I can send you a picture but when this happened, my mom, she makes cakes and we, I, she actually make really great looking cakes and you know, the logo is right here behind my back, like a, a blue square or, I don't know, let's say that in English, a square on the side and diamond. And then she made a cake for it. So that was super cool. We threw a little party with some friends and just, you know, to recognize this milestone that I'm really proud of.

I do remember seeing the cake on, I think it was LinkedIn. You put it on or somewhere. I remember seeing that and that is exciting. May ask you a little later about, you know, World of Warcraft. I know that's one of the opportunities you've had with this. Before we get there though, I know Glenn has a question he's just itching to ask. He's like, paul, be quiet.

I know where you're. I moved that question.

But I, I know I did see that. But I know you're itching to ask this one too.

I get asked about Copilot all the time and I am long term bullish on copilot. Microsoft put 15 billion or now they're over 15 billion. Between their acqui hires and their OpenAI investment. I see what they're trying to do and I know they're going to get there. But it's been slow going to get there. It's kind of like, well, Google's the same way with Gemini. They've made strides recently and I don't know if you saw just the other day, there's now Gemini built into Google sheets where you can put a certain prompt in it. So it's getting there. And I know Copilot for finance, there's not much to it yet. It's going to get there. But I think, like I said, I'm bullish on Microsoft to get it right in the long term. And I picture it, it becomes Clippy's revenge. Clippy is probably before your time.

Yeah, I remember though. I remember. Yeah.

But I do think that they're going to get there and it's going to change. I mean, and Paul and I talk about this all the time. We both came up in our careers and most people in fpa, in finance in general, we take pride in the stuff we can do in Excel and the cool models we can build and everything and all the formulas we know. And I think that Copilot is going to make that irrelevant. You're just going to go in and tell Clippy what to do and it's going to go do all this for you. But it's a kind of a three part question here, I guess. So tell me where you think Copilot is now compared to when they first rolled it out and some cool new features you're seeing and then where you think it's going to go long term and maybe like, you know, what you think is the time not asking you to violate it. I don't know if you have any insider information, but you know, sort of.

I don't have much, so I cannot violate anything. So where is Copilot now in term of Excel? You mean like really the Excel part of things? I think it's really great when you don't know much about Excel first thing. Okay, so apply conditional formatting. You know, like there's very little people that know about conditional formatting. Might sounds crazy. Maybe not the people listening to this podcast, but like in general, probably 99% of people that use Excel don't even know about conditional formatting. Which blows my mind. Right? Like how to remove duplicates or like how to highlight the duplicates in my, my sheet. Right, There you go.

For those who want to see what Clippy looks like and how disturbing he was, sometimes I watch.

I loved Clippy.

All right.

Yeah.

Back to our regularly scheduled program.

It's fine. I loved it. I loved it. So yeah, I think right now where it is, it is to help most people that don't know much about Excel and you can actually ask questions to it and it does basic stuff. So for you and I probably this feature, is it worth paying? Probably not. Right? But still it got really better. Like it was analyzing only 100 lines of data before it was in preview mode. Now it got into the real mode. You know, I don't know say that it got generally available. That's what they say at Microsoft. And it got way better analyzing it can be hundreds of thousands of lines. And I've tried it and it works pretty well. It takes a little bit more time. Right. But still it's really good at having a look at your data flagging. They're trying to develop this feature that is called clean data, which wasn't possible to do when they first launched it. And right now we're in April 2025. It launched in November of 2023 and it evolved so much since then, clean data was not a thing. So what clean data allows you to do is many people just don't even know about pivot tables. And when you're going to do a pivot table and the data is not all written the same way. Let's say you have David Fortin and the person calls me Dave Fortin, David Fortin. Then, you know, it's, it's different entries for your data analysis, right? So what, what clean data is, is doing right now, and it's not perfect, it's getting better. You know, it's just gonna scan your data and tells you, hey, we might have this guy Dave Fortin that is the main same as David Fort. You want me to replace the name, you know, to be one name together. So that's the kind of thing it can do right now. This is one thing, right? But then I thought, like, when I do my presentation, I already talked about my mom and I'm like, oh, I thought co pilot was for. And then I put a picture of my mom. I thought Copilot was for my mom because my mom isn't great at Excel, right? She has other skill set, but Excel is not one of them, right? So like, Excel is. Copilot is really for basic, you know, basic stuff. But then they released the Advanced Analysis mode, which I think is really amazing. Especially I'm. I'm guessing lots of people listening to that is finance people, right? I've been using Excel for 10 years now. I'm, I'm, I'm young, but not that young, right? And, and you know, I've never used Python. I never coded anything. I didn't need to. I was doing audit, you know, and didn't need to. But now with Copilot, they released Advanced Analysis. And I've tried it, you know, a little bit, not extensively, but it can do really nice stuff, right? Python got integrated in Excel last year, and now you can just click on the button, you start the Advanced Analysis. It will set your Excel or Copilot, I shall say, into like a different mode. And then you will be able to ask like, deep questions like, you know, you have a really large data set. Again, I tried it on. Large data set. Like you will ask me to do an internal audit. Can you flag me the transactions that make up to 80% of my expenses. And you know, it will flag it using Python code, which I think is really interesting for someone that, you know, wants to start to get a little bit more advanced or someone like me that never did Python. Now it comes so accessible, you know, and this is something that I think is, is really cool. So that, that's, you know, that's how I see Copilot right now. It's really for beginners, but we're starting to see okay. Accountants that want to go the next level will be able to do it. I think it's a little bit dangerous as well, you know, because if you don't know Python, it generates some codes for you, but it still opens the door at learning more. Oh, I didn't even know that Python could do that. Let me watch a YouTube video and then, you know, you get. You get lost into all this learning opportunities. Right. I think we're in a crazy era right now. And Copilot is part of it. So it says it right. It's your copilot. I don't want it to do like the whole analysis for me. I want him to. Or her or whatever it's called to help me get started. Right. So how I see this whole Copilot thing, and maybe it's not where it's going to go, but they recently added. I didn't try this one. It's like if you will have two Excel files, you know, some people will just go into their folders, open the Excel file, do some comparison, maybe do a vlookup with, you know, two. Two sheets linked together, which I don't like to do because I feel like it's always buggy. But that's another thing. Like you could. You can ask Copilot to actually, can you bring a table from this file and since it's integrated in your Microsoft 365 environment, it going to bring this table if you add some notes. So you can bring the notes from Q2 by instance if you're doing your analysis for Q3. So that. That kind of thing. And where I see this going, and when they announced, I was like, oh, my God, it's going to be crazy. You're going to be able to do a pivot table and just type in the right pane. Send this to my boss by email. And then it's going to send it. We are not there yet, but I think this is something that we're going to go towards. Like, you're making a presentation. You know, I've been FP and A for for a while. You're making a presentation. You have your Excel file. What do you do? You copy and paste. It's linked. It's aff linked. Like a build a presentation from this deck in Excel. And then, you know, it starts a presentation and then it asks you, okay, which template do you want? And then you just. When you use Canva to do images, you can use the eyedropper. Like I will see. Click on the eyedropper and then boom. Emulate this template. That's how I see it. Maybe I'm crazy. Maybe I'm crazy. But what I see right now is like probably just the tip of the iceberg. Is that what we say in English? Like, I feel like it's going to go even further.

The good news is, David, those aren't mutually exclusive. You can be right about this and still be crazy.

Yeah, totally. Exactly.

Just so you know. Because I mean, I am crazy and I'm wrong all the time. But no, it's exciting. I think with Copilot, I agree with you. I think. I know Glenn agrees early on it wasn't very good long term. I think we're all bullish on the ability of Microsoft to get it right. Right. They're very much. You look at any of their products and they, they are of the approach of, hey, let's release minimum viable products and let the community tell us what we want and develop that over time. So most new things that come out from Microsoft, like if you've used Loop, they're kind of, kind of like Notion, the very early version of that, I was like, ugh, now I see it integrated into Teams and Outlook and continuing to prove. And at some point I'm like, okay, do I switch over and just use that? I use ClickUp right now. But we just similar to Notion and use that because it'll be so well integrated within Microsoft and Copilot. So I think, you know, they're taking that approach. I agree it's getting better. You know, the Python, some of those type of things.

And I don't want to go like too off topic here, but in the topic of AI, I think it's a really common practice. Like the marketing teams are pushing it and I don't want to bash anyone, but I've watched a video from. I'm just going to plug this. I watched a video from Marcus Brownlee. He's like the biggest YouTuber that reviews tech. And recently he did a video on Apple Intelligence. I just got iPhone 16 Pro just to. Not for the AI part of thing, but it unlocks AI starting I iPhone 15 Pro. And he talks about like how Apple did a, a publicity, an ad that, you know, you were seeing a lady asking, hey Siri, when did I meet with this person? Like three weeks ago. Like, where was it? And then Siri answers and they took off this, this ad because it was, you know, mistaken. And I think it's a really common practice from all these big companies trying to sell the dream. And maybe it's the Marketing teams, I don't know. But, like, that's one of my goals.

All online marketing people here, we're finance.

I'm a marketing guy now, you know, so. But, you know, it's. It's one of the common mistake right now. And it's my role right now. Like, when I give trainings, I'm not like, hey, guys, you should buy. Go buy. This is amazing. It's like, okay, right now. It's great in Excel for beginners people. It's okay in PowerPoint, but if you want to buy it for, like, others right now, Outlook, etcetera, It's not that quite there, you know, yet. It's. It's okay for like, the chat bot, the security and stuff like that. So it's my role to tell them, like, and try stuff. You know, here's what I could do and here's what I could not do. And I feel there's a lot of hype in lots of the topics right now. And I want to be super transparent because that's. That's how I am in life. And yeah, so that's. That's where we at right now with copilot and. Copilot.

Yeah, I'm sorry, I didn't. I didn't hear anything you just said because ever since you said my mom is not very good at Excel, all I could do is try to think of your mom's so bad at Excel jokes, and I couldn't. The best I could come up with is like, and I. And actually, Paul's great at Excel jokes, so maybe he can have one. I was going to say your mom's so bad at Excel that she gets her pivot tables from ikea. Is that.

That's actually a nice one. Did you. Did you Google that one? Did you copilot this one? ChatGPT or. You came up with it. That's so good. I was afraid when we're going this.

Route, I was like, we don't share our secrets.

Okay.

You're actually not even talking to real Paul and Glenn. This is. You're at 100 in the simulation right now.

We pretty much have just outsourced ourselves.

Yeah.

Glenn and I are on our way to Malaysia. Is that where we're going, Glenn?

That's right. That's right. A couple of weeks. Yeah.

You guys are crazy.

Well, we already told you that. That's a known.

Yeah, that's true.

I mean, you teach a lot of people about copilot. You really mentioned a lot of it is trying to level set and help Them understand where it's at. You mentioned a lot of the use cases are for beginners. So when you think of finance people, where do you think they should be trying to use Copilot? So let's say you're in an FP and a role today, you've stepped back in, you're now full time, you're helping that company. How are you going to use Copilot?

Super great question. I think where the gold mine is is actually probably not using Copilot in Excel. I mean, yes, to an extent. Like with Python, as I told you, get your first Python exploration. Try some stuff. You have to try it. That's one thing. Like can we save time? Can we take a single prompt and you know, send this to the team? So have your tries with your trial. I don't say that with Copilot and Excel. But even without that, without actually paying, you know, the first time I used Chad GPT. Because just a quick reminder, Chad GPT and Copilot, they have the same model, the same large language model underlying GPT4O. As of right now, this episode won't be evergreen because in two weeks it will probably change it. You know, it goes so fast, it.

Will take that long. Two weeks. I figured by tomorrow it would be changed.

Yeah, it's crazy. Crazy pass, right? So you know, go out there, chat GPT.com Microsoft Copilot and you know the strength of Copilot and I don't want to talk too much about security, but you know, the Microsoft security. Even myself sometimes I get locked out my own account because double authenticator, name it the face id, they scan my, my fingerprints. You know, it's kind of crazy but joke aside, like I remember when I was at poker, the company that I did the exit for, it was my first M and A, right? First merger and acquisition. And the first thing I said is like, hey, it's my, my friend is going under an M and A. Like what will be the top question they could ask? We are a SaaS company, you know, and then it helped me, you know, started in brainstorming. So it's, it's so powerful in the term that you are brand new in fpna, let's say. And then you got to do a new job and you're like, what's your first reflex? You're like, okay, I have a budget file, an Excel file by instance. Here is my, my three steps, what I do every day, I export the GL accounts from my ERP and then I do a copy paste. But Then I get many, many mistakes. And you can all only tell your your steps that you do to the the copilot.Microsoft.com and it's going to help you like hey, how can I improve my process, right? Should I get a cube? Should I get an add in and it's going to find you, oh you could have this Excel connector add in that plugs Salesforce and your Excel and then you're just going to be oh my God, I can improve here. So it's just crazy what it can do in term of like assisting you with stuff that you didn't know even existed. You know by now probably a lot of people listening. I've been using ChatGPT, I've been using Microsoft Copilot. One other thing, if I was FPA by instance, I went to a client recently and it was not. I will change a little bit your question. It was not like only finance people, but it was a small company, 20 people in the tourism industry and every year they were doing annual reports and there were, you know, 72 pages PDFs and they were publicly available. So what I did for them, I probably saved three weeks of work for a single person there. I took their annual reports and I even took the five past year, took all of them PDFs, run them through. It was ChatGPT but same same with Copilot run run them through ChatGPT. And I made so many analysis. My first question was hey, here is my annual report. It's. It has 70, 72 pages. Can you tell me the five highlights? If I am the C CEO of the company, I have to pitch to the board. It gave me an answer and then to show them how to prompt I was like okay, now can you give me the five highlights if I am the cfo. And actually the answers that you receive are different because you actually gave a Persona to AI. Second one is actually if you're an FPA, I took this two years annual report 2023 and 2024 and I asked the chatbot to actually compare them. So I took 2, 2 PDFs compare. I actually spotted a section of data that was very similar in terms of, you know, the visuals of it. And I asked it to compare and you know, give highlights and it did honestly a really great job. Is it 100% reliable? No, but it can it save you a lot of time? Yes. So that's how I see it for FPA a little bit. Yeah. I'll stop talking here.

Appreciate that. Appreciate the examples. I think you touched on some Things when you mentioned, you know, asking a question, summarizing data, giving us list, those are areas it's great at. I think those are areas everybody should be using it, right? When you get into hey, how much can I use it for Python, how deep can I get an analysis? You know, there's areas, whether it's copilot, chat, GPT, all of them are going to struggle. Doesn't mean you shouldn't be trying, doesn't mean you can't use them. But we're still developing. But as far as summarizing asking basic questions, you know, helping write an email. If you're not at least using it for that, shame on you basically. I mean, I hate to say it, but you're really missing out if you're not at least using it to make yourself more productive. Not you don't have to be using it for everything, it's not going to do everything. Ever feel like your go to market teams and finance speak different languages? This misalignment is a breeding ground for failure, impairing the predictive power of forecasts and delaying decisions that drive efficient growth. It's not for lack of trying, but getting all the data in one place doesn't mean you've gotten everyone on the same page. Meet qflow AI the strategic finance platform. Purpose built to solve the toughest part of planning an analysis. B2B Revenue QFLO quickly integrates key data from your go to market stack and accounting platform, then handles all the data prep and normalization under the hood. It automatically assembles your go to market stacks, makes segmented scenario planning a breeze and closes the planning loop. Create airtight alignment, improve decision latency and ensure accountability across the teams.

But you know, I want to jump on this a little bit. Shame on you. Yes and no. Because I know these professionals are very busy. I remember when I was I'm still a CPA, but I remember 50, 60 hours a week you're overwhelmed and it's a catch 22. You're like hey, I'm not going to get a training because it's going to take me more time and I have this job to do and I just went this morning, you know right now it's 3pm where I am this morning I gave a three hours training and it was 15 people, 13 CPAs to lawyers and it was first time opening copilot for 99% of them I think 1% already used it. So I showed them like the basics and everything I'm talking here and for them it was like oh my God. And it's a, it's a sexy tool. It's pretty easy to have an entertaining training when you have this sexy tool. A little bit less easy when it's Excel. It's a little bit less sexy these days. I don't know why.

I don't know. I find Excel sexy, and anyone who attends my training finds it. So I don't know if it's the tool, David, or. I don't know. I mean, sometimes old men just have it.

I want to highlight that we're all dressed in the same colors, by the way. Like, I don't. We didn't call each other. I just love it. We're all wearing pink, purple. It's insane. Love it.

All right. Glenn notices I, I messed with his next question. When he looks at this. I had a little bit of fun because he has a question he's very passionate about that he likes to ask.

So it's, there's, there's two more, I think, Paul, you have one, and, and I've got one. And this, like, this angers me. And, and that said, I. There's a place and I, I get it. But when someone just, you know, a casual user or even a power user, like, wants to brag about being a prompt engineer, I want to choke them because I, it's like saying, I'm good at Googling and I, and don't get me wrong, remember before, before Google, before search got smart, you would have to put like, you know, you'd have to put the operators in.

You'd say the Boolean bully operators.

Yeah. And it would be, you know, you'd have to put.

You probably don't remember that, right?

David, I don't really know what you're talking about. And you guys are too old.

Just go play World of Warcraft.

Yeah.

No, but I think, but I know we were talking before the show and prompt engineering does have its place and I've got a whole thing. Paul, you and I have to do an episode where we talk about the late. We got to do our catch up episode. So I don't want to talk about the new prompting guide that OpenAI just came out with around 4.1, because there are some changes. But tell me your, your thoughts on prompt engineering, because some people do it really well, some people don't. And a lot of people just don't really understand what gets a good response and what doesn't.

I explain this all the time, and I'm not a, you know, I'm not a pro at prompting. It's brand new for me. I don't have a PhD in AI. I always say that it's just really important to understand and there is a very great video on YouTube which is not mine. It has 3.2 million views and it's called Generative AI in a nutshell. And I think it's a brilliant video and he just explains how like it's a machine to forecast the next word right and lots of people just don't understand that and I think when you start just understanding that with the context and everything it's so it's so important and to come back to your, your model discussion. So all these AI tools you know and I know we're in future finance so lots of people are probably using AI but like you know they're using a large language model and I didn't even know that. I thought it was going to be later but I think if I'm not mistaken I've seen it pop on my chat GPT. I think it was just on the desktop, not on the mobile but you. You see now automatic and it's going to pick the right model depending on like it's going to detect your prompt depending on which. Which what what your prompts look like it's going to pick the right model. Is it model at reasons little bit more or you know so. So I feel like right now it's, it's a lot of people you know as you said you want to choke then I will not go there but like it's a you know I'm not a prompt engineer. I just can explain to you that yes you can assign the Persona. Yes you can ask the model to work its own solution before actually validating yours. Yes there are some models that are reasoning more a little bit just get started if you, if you didn't and I think all this models picking and stuff I think eventually it's going to go on its own or is going to ask you questions like hey do you want these types of answers? So yes, be good at prompting like no more Google searching anymore. But I think there is a limit anyways. People don't have time to like have a look at like a six hours course on how to prompt and it's you know the truth is like dried out and you're going to feel like what's okay. I got the best results here is it. Was it because of my prompt but I felt I was more detailed and I always tell people talk to AI like it was five years old and add some details and you will be fine. But yeah, that's my thought on prompting. But I think it's a really important skill and eventually all of the jobs I think will change a little bit. Like you will need to know how to use these tools just like you need to know how to use a computer right now. Right? I think, yeah.

And I, you know, as the models get better, it's going to get less and less important. But I had, I, I was working in, in my company earlier today and there's a pretty long prompt where, where these prompts get very important is if you're trying to get it to do a job that you're going to repeat over and over. So it's more if you're doing, if you're building an assistant or a custom GPT and you want it to specifically do something. But we broke down, there was this one area where it was hallucinating every time it was use the attachment and it was making it up and it was pretty long list of instructions. And we finally got to let's make this an if or an if then statement. And so it was, we just made it conditional and it's like, let it talk to it like a computer, say if it equals this, else this and then. And it fixed it right there. But it's, you know, it's funny, you, you talk to it in a lot of ways because it's trained on natural language. You want to talk to it like a human and that's the whole brilliance of it. But at the end of the day, it is still just a computer. And then when you're asking it to apply logic, if you can make those rules very clear and distinct for it to follow, it makes it better. So I think there is still a place. But if you're just using it to summarize documents, it's like you don't have to know it.

Truth is, like most professionals probably don't need to go that deep. There's a very interesting. If you want to go even deeper, I don't know if you saw it. When I build my courses, I always look at the OpenAI website, you know, because again, it's the same model as Copilot. And you know, there is a place where they explain how they made, you know, their, you know, you can build a custom GPT on ChatGPT and there is a place on their website where they explain how they build their com, their custom GPT that is made to build custom GPT. So they actually line it up and it's pretty thorough and it's pretty interesting. I don't recommend if you're like a beginner, like you're gonna get lost and you're gonna be a little bit in.

Sections, some light reading for bedtime. If you're a beginner, yes, totally. But otherwise hold off.

You know, it's Easter on Sunday. You know, it's a perfect read when you get up before getting with the family and stuff like that. OpenAI website.

Nice. That's good advice. And you know, I think, you know, with prompting, the whole thing is nobody gets a canned list of things to ask Google. Right? You just go type the question. I've never seen has anyone gone to Google and typed in, please give me a list of searches I should do for this subject. No, but so many people want to be given standard prompts because AI is new and kind of scares them. So I think the message I'm hearing here is yes, how you write things matters and it can make a difference. Dep, you know, depends more on how granular you're getting, how much that matters. But don't expect someone to give you a list of can prompts. You just gotta go in and learn like nobody, you know, like Excel. There are ideas.

Yeah. And if you ever buy a course, you know about prompt like six hour prompting techniques, it's probably going to be more like here are some examples of what you can do with the tool which is, you know, what people needs as well. Like, oh, I didn't know we can do that. Which prompt did you use? If you use a similar problem, then it's probably going to work as well. Right. So I think we're in this exploration phase, which is I think interesting phase for sure.

So before I get to last question, let me get into the personal section. Tell our audience for a minute how much time you've spent playing World of Warcraft.

Dude, I'm always shy when I say that. I cannot calculate it because when I was young, at 16 years old, I sold my account on eBay for $900. My older brothers were taking care of that, but I, we got the account back and stuff like that. So I kept playing and I built new characters and stuff. So just to, just to let you know, back in the days, taking a character from level 0 to level 60, which was the max level back then was 8 days of played. So 8 days, 8 times 24 hours that you were actually playing. And I had characters, I had three level 60 back in 2006, so I was pretty young, I was 13 years old. And, and my mage, my mage When I was young, in 20, in 2008, had 100 days played. So that's 2400 hours. Right. And that's one character. And I only stopped playing from 2013 to 2020. So I only stopped seven years during all that time. So I have to estimate probably around 20,000 hours, sadly. But it made me who I am. I still play to this day. I. I played Monday for four, five hours.

Hey, we all have to have our passions, but I share that because what did that give you an opportunity to do? Give us a quick kind of one minute of what did you do last year that had to do with World of Warcraft?

Yeah. So In December of 2024, I got asked to co author the Microsoft Excel World Championship. And the theme was World of Warcraft. And since, you know, I played a lot, just like I told you, I co authored the case with Andrew Grigoljunovich. And that's actually where we met the first time in December in Vegas, me and Paul. That was super cool experience. I had chills. No, all along. You know, you've been playing a game the whole. Your whole life. You're doing content on Excel and now, you know, full circle, you know, and crazy. So. So, yeah, that. That was a cool experience.

Love it. I. I think this is a good place to move into our personal questions here. So here's how this. This game works, at least for me. Glenn takes a little bit of a different approach. We like to mix it up. So I'm afraid we used AI to come up with some personal questions that we can ask.

Oh, my God.

We put in our questions, a bio, I think your website and AI went to work crafting these questions. So you get two options for me. You can pick a number between one and 25, put the human in the loop, or AI can pick a number between one and twenty five. And I asked that question. So which one you going with?

We are at Future Finance. So let AI decides.

All right, so let's see what the. Not really AI, but random number generator.

Close enough in between.

Exactly. Here it is. Number 13.

13. Oh, my God.

This content inspiration is what it put it under. Where do you draw inspiration for your unique teaching methods and content themes?

Oh, my God. I consume a lot of content. Instagram, lots of business podcasts. So basically all I do mine right before when I was doing FP&A, I was listening a lot to you. FP&A. Today, a little bit less right now, to be honest with you. But I listened to a podcast that is called Think Media. Podcast, actually it's a YouTube course that I bought from them and it changed my life. Like I learned how to do a great YouTube video from them and that's how I listen now I listen a little bit of diary of a CEO. The latest episode from Mr. Beast is insane. So all, you know, listening to people that were, you know, college dropout that now have a huge business on YouTube. It's, it's where I get my inspiration. I watch the best of the best as well. You know, I watch a lot of Leila. So it's, it's very inspiring to be like, oh, how do we make a quality video? Like tell the tips and you know, like all these. I, I don't compare myself to Leila. She's. She's way doing way, way more experience, way better content. You know, I'm getting there. But lots of people in my niche and lots of people outside of my niche as well. I'm trying to make it a little bit more, you know, compelling because this topic can be very boring. So. So yeah, that's where I get all my inspiration. I listen to stories and you don't have any idea how many like, because when I play Wow. I listen to podcasts because, you know, that's a game where I can do both at once. So that's, that's a lot of podcasts listening to you to these business basically.

Called this theme Our Finance and the stuff we do, you know, kind of boring.

I mean, lots of it is, to be honest with you, I'm sure lots.

Of people agree, but I, I know.

So, so my approach is a little bit different. So Paul, who, which, which bot created these questions?

It was chat G20 and I believe it was 4. 5. I think it might have been 4.0, but I'm pretty sure it was 4 or 5.

So you know, they're gonna, again, we've got to do our catch up show. They're gonna deprecate four or five. It's just, it's too, it's really, it's. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Too expensive, too slow. And they're doing some other stuff now, so I don't know if there's a timeline on it, but, but you know, five to your earlier point when GPT 5 comes, it's gonna, you're not gonna have to do the model picker at all. You're just gonna type in and Anthropic's doing that a little bit now with Claude.

Okay.

Where you don't have to.

Yeah.

They just reduced the number of options too they used to give you, do you want a concise style? And all these things. And I was in there yesterday, and that's all gone now. And, you know, they've added a few where, hey, you can link it directly to your Google Drive or your one Drive.

And it's crazy how fast it moves, right? Like, we can talk about something. Someone will listen tomorrow, and it's like, what are they talking about? I don't see the option.

Yeah, it's like, there's no such thing as evergreen content with this podcast, which.

Is an issue with my online courses, by the way, but I'll let you ask your question, Glenn. I'm sorry.

So. So my approach is, after we. We create all the questions, I will go and I'll just pick different models every week and do it. And I. I tell it, hey, I only get to ask one question. Which one should I ask? So this week I'm using Grok, and Grok says if you only get one question, I'd recommend asking. From numbers to narratives, what inspired your transition from a traditional CPA role to becoming the piggy bank accountant on YouTube? And then it goes on to tell me why. This question gets to the heart of their journey, revealing the motivation behind their unique career pivot and how they built their brand. It's broad enough to elicit a personal, engaging story while touching on their professional evolution, making it a great choice for insight and inspiration. So Grok is really tugging at the heartstrings there, and we want to know what inspired you to make that move.

Inspiration.

Yes. So, super great question. So I'll start from. It all goes back to World of Warcraft. I'm not kidding. I was doing Twitch after while during the pandemic, I was really bored. I was like, what can I do? I started doing Twitch, got a little bit more steady at it. For those who don't know, Twitch is like, you film yourself gaming, so it's live streaming. And I twitched for like a thousand hours. And then the pandemic ended. And I was like, you know, I will love to do this full time, but, you know, gaming for 12 hours straight, my brain is getting fried. And I'm an accountant and I love to help people. And not that I don't feel that I help people. I do. But, you know, I got. I got a little bit sick of Twitch and I started doing YouTube, but for. For World of Warcraft, so that's where I started doing videos. And I've always made videos. I always loved it. And at some point I was like, you know what, let's try to mix. You know, my twitch name was Jean Bon, which means ham. That's where the piggy bank came from. You know, so and. And then we were brainstorming my previous CEO and I, and we were like, okay, it's time to leave World of Warcraft streaming and start doing professional stuff. You know, because that's what I like to do every accountant. And it was like PE bank accountant. I was like, let's try that, right? And then that's where the brand started. And I. February 10th of 2023, I took a Friday off. I made a video. I still have my payout on. It's my first video on YouTube. You can go see. It's. It's called the VLOOKUP XLOOKUP whatever. You know, it's. That's typical video. It's probably. It's my worst video ever. It's my first about Excel and it's February 10th, 2023. You can go see on YouTube on the about section is going to be written. When did your channel start? February 10, 2023. And I'll start it because I saw CatNORC and Ms. Excel on Instagram doing, you know, these dance move in Excel. And I was like, you know what? I think I can, I could do that. I think I have like everything I need and I could do that. Like, I have everything it needs to do that kind of thing. And yeah, so Kat inspired me. I told her the other day, I got a call with her. It was super cool. If you don't know her, Kat nor on, on or Ms. Excel on Instagram. And yeah, so basically that, that's what I, that's what happened. And then we were selling the company as I told you, like there was a company exit and they didn't fire anyone. But like I was like, okay, am I at this point, like I really enjoyed making videos. I was waking up 5am making my videos with my pig out back then. And then I had this very deep voice because I just woke up and I was filming. I could not sleep, I swear, could not sleep. And it was like 5am to like 8am and then I was doing my day job and then after I was getting back at thumbnails and videos. So so that's how it got started. And you know, at some point, August 18, 2023, 18 of August, that was my last day at work. I told my, my bosses, you know, like one month before, two months before, like, hey, we have this exit thing. I don't know where this is going, but I really enjoy making videos. I'm gonna try my luck at it. I got a, you know, exit package and all that, all that stuff. So I was like, you know what, let's take this money. Let's, you know, drop my full time CPA salary. Let's go all in on YouTube and call it the YouTube Marathon. So, so ChatGPT or Grok told you that it was going to go to the art of the story. So I called it the Youth the marathon. So as YouTube is very long, it's a marathon. And then I decided to make in person marathon as well running. So I was like, let's give it a year and see where this goes. And you're like, everything that we're discussing is happening. Like, I got the Microsoft MVP. I just came back from LinkedIn learning to do a course course with being a LinkedIn instructor. LinkedIn learning instructor. So, so all, all this stuff. So I just decided to go all in. And here we go here. Here we are. So that's why I decided to stop doing accounting. Another thing, I think actually the thing that motivates me the most is like I keep saying that accounting is boring, Daniel. But one thing, being a cpa, I need to do my mandatory CPE credits, I think you call it, instead of states here. It's like different. It's the same. All these trainings that I was buying were very boring and I was like, maybe I can help this topic. Right? I don't like paying 800 bucks for eight hours training and I'm sleeping in 10 minutes after, you know, so that's, that's why I am also trying to make it a little bit funnier, you know, a bit more fun. I think there is room into this different style. So, so that, that's, that's, that's the whole story. That's my motivation behind. And I just love making videos and helping people, man. That's about it.

That's great. That's great. Well, you've, it's really been amazing to watch. I know we, we, we spoke on my other podcast a while back and seeing you continue to, to excel in this area. Excel. See what I did there, Paul?

Another.

I did that. That is why you are the master of hosting shows, Glenn.

It annoys me because for me, yeah, for me in English, it's very hard to do wordplay like that. But in French, you've never heard my French. It's crazy.

And I will vouch that February 10, 2023 is the day because David sent me a nice long email about wanting to create a YouTube channel, and his original channel was gaming. So David and I have been messaging now for two. Almost two and a half years.

Yeah. Best friends now, pretty much.

I'm waiting for you.

Hey, wait, what about me, Paul?

What do we.

What am I, chopped liver?

What do we. Well, you're. You're my best co host.

Okay?

I mean, on this show, there's not even a second. You are far and away the number one co host I do a show with.

Perfect.

All right. I think with that, we probably bored our audience enough for one week. But, David, thank you for joining us. Like Glenn said, it's fabulous to watch how your career has taken off, all you've accomplished. Keep up the great work. We're excited for your LinkedIn learning course, excited for audience to share this. And we, as we like, say, go forth and use AI. Don't be afraid of it. Give it a try. It might help you.

So thanks, David. Thank you.

Thanks for listening to the future finance show and thanks to our sponsor, qflow.AI if you enjoyed this episode, please leave a rating and review on your podcast platform of choice. And may your robot overlords be with you.

SA.