Friendly reminder from your unsucky friend: Copilot is not just for meeting minutes.

Yes, it’s impressive that it can summarize what just happened in that painfully long 2-hour check-in. But as I keep saying, if that’s the only thing you’re using it for, you’re basically paying for a very expensive notetaker. Let’s aim higher, shall we?

Copilot in Excel is where things get really interesting. It’s not just a tool for spreadsheet pros—it’s an AI-powered sidekick for beginners, analysts, and everyone in between who needs help organizing, analyzing, and visualizing their data with less drama and fewer YouTube tutorials.

What Copilot in Excel can actually do

This isn’t Clippy. This is a trained, tuned large language model built into Excel that knows how to take your vague prompt and turn it into pivot tables, formulas, charts, and actionable insights. It won’t do your taxes, but it might actually make sense of your budget data. Here’s just a taste of what it brings to the party:

• Summarize large datasets without writing complex formulas.
• Generate charts and visuals with prompts like “Show a line graph of revenue over the past 6 months.”
• Highlight trends and outliers you didn’t even know were there.
• Create pivot tables with one sentence and zero screaming.
• Suggest cleanup and formatting actions to tame the wild spreadsheet.
• Explain formulas in plain English—no cryptic syntax required.

Where to start

Before you throw data at Copilot, make sure your workbook isn’t a dumpster fire. Format your data as a table, avoid merged cells, and keep things tidy. Copilot can work magic, but it can’t and won’t fix chaos you created back in 2016.

1. Click the Copilot button in the ribbon (it shows up automatically if your tenant is licensed and enabled). And I will assume you are if you’re reading this.
2. Pick a suggested action or write your own prompt.
3. Review the result, make edits, and refine until it makes sense to humans.

Try these beginner prompts

Feeling stuck? That blinking cursor can be intimidating. Start small. These beginner-friendly prompts are great for warming up, testing what Copilot can do, and building confidence with everyday scenarios. No shame in copy-pasting—we’ve all been there.

• “Summarize sales performance by region.”
• “Create a pivot table showing total revenue by product category.”
• “Visualize customer growth over time using a bar chart.”
• “Find trends in this dataset and highlight any revenue drops.”
• “Help me clean this column of inconsistent product names.”

Power user tip: talk like a human

Don’t worry about sounding technical. Copilot gets you. Say things like “count how many orders we had in July” and it’ll turn that into the formula magic you’d otherwise have to Google 12 times. It also shows its work, so you learn by doing (or copying—no shame).

Go deeper with these resources

Want to sharpen your skills even more? Microsoft’s got you covered. These official guides, prompt galleries, and blog posts are solid gold if you want to explore the full power of Copilot in Excel—or if you’re just tired of pretending you know what “nested IFs” are.

• Get started with Copilot in Excel (support.microsoft.com)
• Identify insights with Copilot in Excel
• Format data for Copilot in Excel
• Copilot Prompt Gallery for Excel
• Copilot in Excel: Transforming Data Analysis (Microsoft Tech Community)

Last word: don’t sleep on this

Copilot in Excel isn’t just for people building dashboards or running reports. It’s for anyone who has ever stared blankly at a cell wondering what it all means. Whether you’re tracking budgets, organizing a list of speakers, or just trying to get some clarity out of a mess of numbers—this is your shortcut to unsucking your spreadsheet life.

Now cue the happy dance. 💃