Unlocking AI-Enabled Analysis

1. Getting Started with Copilot in Excel

Hi, and welcome to this course on Microsoft Copilot in Excel!

2. Meet your instructor...

This course was created with Susanth Sutheesh, Senior Solutions Engineer for Copilot and Agentic AI at Microsoft.

3. What is Copilot in Excel?

When you hear about "Microsoft Copilot", you may immediately think of the chat interface, where you can ask general questions, upload documents for review and explanations, or request documents be created based on prompts. But Copilot is much more than this. Copilot is a productivity companion that's integrated across the full Microsoft 365 application suite.

4. What is Copilot in Excel?

In Excel, Copilot is your analytical companion that can help you generate data, explain formulas, and perform multi-step analyses. In this course, you'll learn how Copilot can augment your existing Excel workflows, differentiate between asking and doing inside Excel, and validate what Copilot gives you before relying on it. Let's dive in!

5. Chatting vs. Doing

When using Copilot in Excel, there are two modes of working with Copilot: chatting and doing. For tasks like asking questions about your data, getting explanations for formulas, or receiving suggestions, we're not looking for Copilot to make instant changes to our workbooks. These conversations may eventually lead us to that point, but we don't need to give Copilot that agency from the beginning. This is the default behavior of Copilot's chat interface. Alternatively, tasks like creating example data, building charts, and running analyses require Copilot to have the agency to make edits to our workbooks. To enable this in Excel, we need to activate Copilot's agent mode. So when you open Copilot, consider what the desired output of the interaction is to determine whether agent mode is required or not.

6. OneDrive to rule them all!

In both modes, ensuring that your workbook is saved to OneDrive is key to unlocking these capabilities. OneDrive gives Copilot seamless access to your worksheets—another example of how tightly it’s integrated across Microsoft apps. In browser versions of Excel, like what we'll be using in this course, this OneDrive connection should be automatic. For desktop versions, you'll need to ensure that the AutoSave button is switched on.

7. Example: Generating Mock Data

Let's start to use Copilot by creating a mock dataset. Because we're looking for Copilot to add data into our workbook, we'll want to make sure agent mode is enabled. Select the tools button and select agent mode from the list of options. From here, we can prompt Copilot with the task and context needed. We request a table with three columns called userID, region, and numTransactions, and ten rows of data. When we run this request, we can see that Copilot reasons about the task, then adds it directly into our workbook. How amazing is that? Next up, let's ask Copilot to create and explain a formula for calculating the number of transactions per region using our dataset. Because we're not looking for direct edits this time, we can turn agent mode off.

8. Example: Formula Explanation

We prompt Copilot to create and explain a formula for the number of transactions per region. These kinds of requests mean you can focus on higher level thinking and less on debugging formula errors. Once it's done, you can ask for follow-up clarifications, and even insert this into your sheet from the chat. Disabling agent mode just meant that any formulas weren't inserted into our workbook by default.

9. Let's practice!

Time for you to begin exploring the two modes of using Copilot in Excel!

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