Copilot in Excel

What can Copilot actually do in Excel?

Cleaning messy data

This is the unglamorous superpower. Real spreadsheets have phone numbers in four formats, emails buried in text, inconsistent capitalization. Ask Copilot to "standardize all phone numbers to (XXX) XXX-XXXX format" or "extract the email addresses from this column into a new column" and it generates the cleanup across every row. Data cleaning used to be the longest part of spreadsheet work; it's now the fastest.

Writing formulas

Describe the calculation in words and Copilot writes the formula. It handles lookups, conditional logic, and multi-sheet references well. Always sanity-check the result on a few rows you can verify by hand — Copilot is confident even when it's wrong, and a wrong formula applied to 10,000 rows is worse than no formula.

PivotTables, charts, and dashboards

"Build a PivotTable showing total sales by region and month, then chart it" is a single prompt. Copilot creates the PivotTable with live links to your source data, so it updates when the data updates. Dashboards and planning templates work the same way — describe the layout, let it build the pieces, then adjust.

Asking questions about your data

"What drove the revenue dip in March?" "Which products have the most returns?" Copilot answers with a mix of summaries, charts, and highlighted outliers. This is the fastest way to orient yourself in a spreadsheet you inherited or haven't opened in weeks — faster than building exploratory formulas from scratch.

Sorting, filtering, and formatting

Highlighting top performers, applying conditional formatting, sorting and filtering by criteria you describe in words. Mundane, but it's the stuff that eats afternoons.

Pulling in outside data

Copilot can import data from other workbooks saved to your OneDrive or SharePoint, and it can fetch information from the web to ground its answers (with citations to the sources it used). Useful when your analysis needs a number that isn't in the spreadsheet.