Welcome to the fourth installment of our Copilot series! After exploring the exciting new capabilities in Copilot Chat, Word, and PowerPoint, we're now turning our attention to the Excel updates that are transforming how we work with data.

While Copilot has been available in Excel for some time, recent updates have significantly expanded its capabilities and integration points. The latest enhancements make Copilot an even more powerful assistant for data analysis and manipulation.

If you missed the other installments of this series, you can find them below:

Transform Your Data with New Cleaning Tools for Excel on the Web

The web version of Excel has received powerful new data cleaning capabilities. With these Copilot enhancements, cleaning and organizing your data has never been easier:

Receive intelligent suggestions for standardizing data formats
Get alerts about potential inconsistencies in columns that might affect your analysis
Automate data cleaning and focus on making smarter decisions

This capability dramatically reduces the time spent on data preparation, which is often the most tedious part of any analysis. Instead of manually hunting for format inconsistencies or text variations, Copilot proactively identifies these issues and suggests corrections, allowing you to focus on deriving insights!

Fresh Prompt Suggestions

Excel's latest update brings intelligent inspiration directly to your spreadsheet work. When you open Copilot in Excel, you'll now find a dynamic collection of context-aware prompt suggestions that refresh regularly.

Ongoing inspiration: Open Copilot in Excel to explore a continuously updated selection of prompts that can help you level up your spreadsheets.

These tailored suggestions offer ideas for analysis techniques you might not have considered. For example, when working with sales data, you might see suggestions for trend analysis or seasonal patterns. With employee information, Copilot might recommend visualizations for team distribution or performance metrics.

This feature is particularly valuable when you're not sure what questions to ask of your data or when you want to explore analytical approaches beyond your usual techniques.

Analyze Text Columns

Copilot can now analyze columns of text in Excel to give you summaries of the information.

Whether you're analyzing survey responses, product reviews, or any other text-based information, Copilot can now help you extract key themes, sentiments, and insights from text columns. This makes it easier to derive meaningful conclusions from unstructured text data without requiring specialized text analysis skills.

Reason Over Data Without Perfect Tables

Copilot can now reason over data ranges with only a single row of headers on top. This means you don't need perfectly formatted tables to gain insights from your data.

The ability to work with less structured data makes Copilot more adaptable to real-world scenarios where data isn't always presented in ideal formats.

Analyze and Interpret Data Using Formula Columns

Ask Copilot in Excel to add a formula column based on a selected table in your spreadsheet and analyze your data. This feature allows you to:

Create calculated fields without knowing the exact formula syntax
Add derived metrics to enhance your analysis
Calculate key performance indicators automatically

Simply select your data and ask Copilot to add the appropriate formula column, specifying what you want to calculate. Copilot will generate the correct formula and apply it across your data.

Work Smarter, Not Harder

These updates to Excel significantly reduce the barriers to effective data analysis. By automating data cleaning, simplifying formula creation, and providing access to advanced analytical capabilities, Copilot makes Excel more accessible. If you're interested in learning more about implementing these Copilot features across your organization, reach out to our Managed Services team today!

Learn more about Microsoft Copilot here.

Copilot in Excel: New Capabilities!