How to use Copilot in Microsoft Excel

What Copilot in Microsoft Excel can do

Microsoft Excel is used for a wide range of tasks pertaining to data organization and analysis. It’s a powerful tool for creating spreadsheets, managing budgets, and tracking changes in data. Many professionals rely on Excel for data visualization, using charts and graphs to present information clearly. Users can manipulate large sets of data with specific formulas for a range of applications, and all these things can be simplified by using Copilot in Microsoft Excel.

This AI tool can highlight insights from data, generate suggestions for formulas, and help you filter and sort information. Here’s how!

• Not a Microsoft 365 Subscriber?
• Try Copilot in Microsoft 365 with a free trial

• Current Microsoft 365 Subscriber?
• Try Copilot in Excel now

Generate formulas and manage data

You might be familiar with using generative AI for writing things or coming up with ideas, but Copilot in Excel might be your new favorite tool for formulas and managing data. If you can’t think of the formula you need, describe the calculations you want in plain language. Copilot will write a formula and explain how it works. If you want quick calculations, column creation, and more, Copilot in Excel has you covered, too.

Here are a few prompts to generate formulas and manage data with Copilot in Excel:

• Create a column that shows the percent difference between Q1 and Q2 revenues.
• Create a column that combines data from the first and second columns into one, with a space between the data.
• Add a column to extract the month from the date.
• Write a formula for the average of each column.
• Add a pivot table grouped by category as determined in column A.
• Write a lookup formula to match [product name] to [product sales].
• Calculate the percentage increase from cell A2 to cell B2.

What’s more, Copilot will show a suggestion for the formula it’s planning to implement and often preview the result before adding them to your spreadsheet, just to make sure you’re getting the data you want.

Turn data into insights with Excel

Make better decisions backed by data and insights

Learn more

Organization

Entering data into a table or spreadsheet is one thing, but organizing it so that it’s visually appealing and tells a story is quite another. Use Copilot to clean up messy data for you. Ask it to remove extra spaces, highlight duplicates, sort data, and merge values from different columns with prompts like these:

• Remove all extra spaces in this sheet.
• Highlight duplicate values in yellow in column A.
• Sort the data in column C from largest to smallest.
• Format the numbers as a date with the whole month spelled out and four digits for the year.

Once your data is correct, call out important values or add conditional formatting to make it more visually appealing:

• Highlight the five lowest values in the column.
• Bold the five highest values in the column.
• Apply a red-yellow-green color scale to the column.
• Highlight cells containing the words “Oral Health” in green.

Think of Copilot as an intelligent helper that enhances your user experience in Excel. You don’t need to know any of the Excel-specific formulas; instead, communicate your intentions and goals using plain language, which is a huge time saver if you’re not an expert at Excel.

Analysis and visualization

A spreadsheet is an incredible way to organize data, but a chart or graph is often better to represent findings, especially if you’re sharing them with someone who isn’t familiar with the information. Copilot in Microsoft Excel creates charts to help visualize your data in a clear and understandable way. Try prompts like these:

• Create a bar chart that shows growth by region.
• Show total sales revenue by quarter as a line chart.
• Create a pie chart showing a breakdown of students from the graduating class attending colleges.
• Generate a bar graph showing Q1, Q2, and Q3 revenue by project.

While visualizing data in a chart is great, adding extra analysis of your collected information can help make your point, whether it’s for work, school, or convincing someone that they should buy that new car since it won’t depreciate as fast as they think it will. Look to Copilot in Excel to analyze the data you’ve collected, organize it, and identify helpful insights and patterns.

The Copilot in Excel sidebar provides a few options to help you get started. Analyze is one of those options, and from there, just select Show data insights. Copilot in Excel will conduct its analysis of your data through pivot tables and pivot charts and will generate charts that highlight different aspects of the data. If you want to really do a deep dive into the data, prompt Copilot for a breakdown of specific categories. Also tell Copilot to present the data in its analysis as a different kind of graph and even to adjust the categories within the graph.

• Show a breakdown of revenue by design projects.
• Analyze the current project schedule based on materials and labor to identify trends or patterns that could inform optimization.
• Show me insights from this dataset.
• How many fidget spinners did we sell in April?

Using Copilot in Microsoft Excel makes it easier to work with spreadsheets. It helps you complete routine tasks like cleaning up your data so that you can focus on analysis rather than making sure that all your formulas are correct. What’s more, Copilot is designed to be used by everyone, no matter their skill level. Change the way you interact with data and spreadsheets with Copilot in Microsoft Excel.