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Today, we unveiled the next wave of Copilot including the announcement that Copilot in Excel is now generally available and ready to assist data-driven professionals around the world. In addition, we also announced the public preview of Copilot in Excel with Python, enabling powerful advanced analysis.
Previously, we talked about the vision of how Copilot in Excel could revolutionize the way you understand your data and make better business decisions. We’ve been listening to your feedback and are excited to share improvements for those of you who depend on Excel regularly. Copilot in Excel is built into your workbook, enabling you to iterate with it quickly and easily. This integration allows you to continually prompt as you work, making it feel like you have an Excel expert right by your side.
We heard from those of you who are avid users, that you need even more to supercharge your Excel experience. Copilot in Excel with Python can help you gain deeper insights without needing to be a Python expert.
In this post, we’ll share some lessons from our own Microsoft team members who have been trying out Copilot in Excel in their work. Let’s take a closer look at how Copilot in Excel can help you carry out your daily Excel needs and conduct advanced analysis.
Copilot is your personal Excel expert
Those of you who are frequent Excel users can spend hours every day just formatting your data sheets to more clearly view and use your data. Let Copilot be your personal Excel expert and help you with these frequent tasks. Copilot can now reason over structured data, not just tables, and it can complete tasks such as adding filters or splitting text. Copilot can also help you highlight important information with formula based conditional formatting. For example, Copilot simplifies the process of highlighting crucial information, such as spending that’s higher than revenue in a sales sheet.
Copilot in Excel is asked to highlight marketing spend if it is higher than revenue. Copilot provides a suggested conditional formatting formula. The suggestion is applied and the highlights appear in the spreadsheet.Excel has hundreds of different formulas to help you organize, visualize and get insights out of your data. While many of you rely on the same formulas every day, we’ve heard that you would like to expand your use of formulas as well as easily access the ones you use regularly. Now you don’t need to do an online search to look up formulas, you can just ask Copilot right in your spreadsheet. Recently we added support for complex formulas like XLOOKUP and SUMIF as well.
“Copilot helps me with automating some of the repetitive tasks I have...It increases my productivity...helping me write the formulas.” - Victoria, Microsoft Manager
Copilot in Excel is asked to calculate the profit and profitability. Copilot provides suggested formulas. One of the suggestions is previewed, then inserted into the spreadsheet.Copilot not only executes formulas and formatting, but it also provides steps and explanations along the way. When you ask Copilot a question, it will now respond with a suggestion and an explanation of all the steps to show its “thinking”. You can preview the suggested action and then choose to apply – keeping you in control.
When Copilot can’t make a direct change to your data, it will provide you with steps you can take to make the change yourself – saving you from research outside of Excel and keeping you in the flow of your work. By demystifying these elements, Copilot empowers you to take full advantage of Excel's capabilities, turning what could be a time-consuming task into a seamless and efficient experience.
Copilot in Excel provides steps to manually accomplish a task, creating a specific chart.Gain insights with everyday language
Data-driven decision-making is critical for business success. But often gaining insights is one of the most difficult parts of working with data. Copilot can help! Simply request insights from Copilot using natural language, whether you are requesting patterns or analyzing trends.
“When I get a new data that I need to analyze, I use Copilot with a quick prompt of just ‘show me insights on the data’ and Copilot quickly gives me a very broad range of tables and charts that I can explore further and analyze deeper.” - Victoria, Microsoft Manager
As part of Copilot’s analysis, we’re excited to announce that it now recommends the best visual formats, like bar charts, line graphs, or PivotTables and formulates the right sets of fields, layouts, and filters for you – creating a specific chart or PivotTable so you can get all the benefits of Excel’s powerful capabilities without being an expert! For example, a sales consultant can easily understand the relationship between ad spend and campaign reach, with Copilot generating a PivotTable to aid in planning the next quarter's budget.
Copilot in Excel is asked to group units sold by state. Copilot provides a suggested PivotTable. The PivotTable is inserted onto a new spreadsheet.Copilot in Excel with Python
Analysts often have specific needs to conduct analysis which takes time and expertise. Now using Copilot in Excel with Python, you can conduct advanced analysis that was previously out of reach. You can use natural language to describe the analysis you want to perform, and Copilot will automatically generate, explain, and insert Python code into your Excel spreadsheet.
Copilot in Excel with Python is prompted to forecast revenue. Copilot creates and inserts Python code including a chart.This unlocks powerful analytics via Python for visualizations, cleaning data, machine learning, predictive analytics, and more - without needing to be Python proficient yourself. Copilot in Excel with Python also renders stunning visuals that were previously not possible or were difficult to create. Unique visuals like heatmaps, pairplots, multiplots, and violin plots help you understand and communicate your analysis.
Copilot in Excel with Python is asked to visualize data. Copilot creates and inserts Python code resulting in three chart types.
Copilot in Excel with Python generates colorful network graphs.Python in Excel leverages Anaconda Distribution for Python which includes the most popular Python libraries such as pandas, Matplotlib and scikit-learn. Now, Copilot in Excel with Python can use these libraries too, unlocking their potential with everyday language.
Copilot in Excel with Python not only analyzes and visualizes, but it also shares its thinking, showing and explaining the code it’s using so that you understand how it’s working. It creates a dedicated analysis sheet, with a sandbox for you to collaborate with Copilot, while leaving the original source data untouched. The analysis is refreshable so when source data is updated, you can get an updated analysis as well.
“Copilot in Excel advanced analysis gives me the opportunity to build graphs faster and easier and also format them just right the first time. So instead of having to figure out Python by myself or also trying to figure out where exactly in the formula I need to change my inputs so that the graph looks right, I can just communicate that to Copilot and it’s going to do that for me. “ - Anca, Microsoft Manager
Because it's all in Excel you can easily share and collaborate with others. For those who are comfortable with Python in Excel, you can even edit the code directly in the spreadsheet giving you full control to adjust as you wish.
“When it comes to collaboration that’s obviously the core of Excel ... It’s purely a collaboration tool and it’s used for providing different perspectives and always making sure there’s a collaborative sense. You never do a model on your own...” - Wes, Microsoft Analyst
Copilot in Excel with Python is rolling out to Windows for Insiders and requires a Microsoft 365 Copilot license. Once enabled you can simply click the “Advanced analysis” prompt suggestion or write a customized prompt asking Copilot to “analyze with Python”. We’re also excited to announce that Python in Excel (the experience outside of Copilot), is now generally available in Excel for Windows. To learn more about Python in Excel read the announcement blog.
Transform text to actionable insights
Not all analysis is done with numerical data and we’ve heard from many of you that you need help making sense of text-based data. We’ve taken this feedback and have expanded Copilot’s capabilities beyond traditional numerical analysis. We’re excited to announce that Copilot can now analyze text, transforming raw textual data into actionable insights. This innovation ensures that Copilot can handle complex datasets, whether they are numerical or textual, with the same level of precision and efficiency, ultimately driving better business outcomes.
For instance, a marketing manager can obtain a summary of product reviews to better understand opportunities and challenges. Being able to analyze text with Copilot saves the marketing manager valuable time and energy. And having a summary in seconds means they can make informed decisions or even take action much more efficiently than before.
Copilot in Excel provides an analysis of written customer reviews.Copilot in Excel with Python helps you go even further by analyzing text-based data too. This provides even deeper insights such as sentiment analysis and keyword extraction, powerful text analytics libraries such as NLTK, and unique visuals like a word cloud that help communicate text-based trends.
Copilot in Excel with Python conducts text analysis. It inserts the analysis, including a word cloud, onto a new sheet.Copilot in action with Microsoft’s Finance team
Play the video to learn more about how Anca, Victoria and Wes from our Microsoft Finance team utilize Copilot in Excel for their daily needs and advanced analysis.
Transform how you work with data
Excel has long been the cornerstone of data analysis for businesses, researchers, and analysts worldwide. We’re excited to continue Copilot in Excel’s evolution into an assistant that helps transform raw data into actionable insights with greater efficiency and accuracy than ever before. Copilot in Excel with Python brings us a step closer to the vision of analysts leveraging the power of conversational AI with Copilot in Excel to transform how they work with complex data.
Try Copilot in Excel today with a Microsoft 365 Copilot license and join the Microsoft 365 Insider’s program for Copilot in Excel with Python.
Please send feedback in the app and check out below for more information:
- Microsoft 365 Announcement blog: Microsoft 365 Copilot Wave 2 blog
- Python in Excel now generally available: announcement blog
- Support article: Get started with Copilot in Excel - Microsoft Support
- Support article: Copilot in Excel with Python - Microsoft Support
- LinkedIn Learning course – free through the end of 2025: Excel with Copilot: AI-Driven Data Analysis | LinkedIn Learning
- You may also be interested in Microsoft 365 Copilot finance agent, which delivers generative AI capabilities purpose-built for finance professionals. Agents allow you to enhance Microsoft 365 Copilot by connecting it to new data sources and applications and expanding its functionality. Check out this site for more information.
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