Using Copilot in Excel – a brief introduction to the AI package

Using Copilot in Excel – the Microsoft AI package that can be used along your spreadsheets

This week’s hint and tip is slightly different as it looks at a brief introduction to using Copilot in Excel. Copilot is Microsoft’s AI tool and so we thought we’d do a short hint and tip on some key points of using it as well as a little introduction to it.  We are going to go through it now below.

** note: currently at the date this is published all the information is correct, but as Copilot is updated, some of the information below might update and change. It is always worth checking your subscription information or check the Microsoft website if you are unsure **

Copilot in Excel

Copilot is an AI tool that is available for users in all the Microsoft packages. It can be used for a variety of tasks and there are a number of options it can be used for in Excel.

Within your Microsoft subscription package you will receive a number of AI credits. The amount will depend on the subscription package that you have. Each action you do with uses AI will deduct a credit from your balance. This balance resets at the beginning of each month. If you want more credits you can subscribe to Copilot Pro.

Some key points

For Copilot to work on your documents, AutoSave must be turned on. If it is not, then you will only be able to chat to Copilot and not use the other features it has available within the package. You might also need to go into your Excel options settings and enable it.

Once you have AutoSave turned on, your data will need to be formatted in a specific way for Copilot to work and be able to carry out the task you require in Excel.

You will need to either have your data formatted as an Excel Table or as a supported range. Formatting as an Excel Table is through the use of the option found on the Home Tab. A supported range is data where it has not been formatted as a table but meets all the following requirements:

• Only one header row
• No blank headers
• Headers are only on columns, not on rows
• Headers are unique, no duplicate headers
• No merged cells
• No empty rows or columns
• Data is formatted in a consistent way
• No subtotals

Versions of Excel

Some options are currently only available to the web version of Excel (e.g. Clean Data) but are being rolled out to the desktop versions soon.

Copilot is seen as being especially useful for users who have large datasets that need tidying up or summarising quickly. We are going to go through an example of how it can be used for data analysis in a future hint and tip.

When using Copilot within Excel, it’s important to click on the arrow and choose the ‘App Skills’ option. This allows you to use the AI tool with your data within the workbook you are currently in, rather than just asking the AI tool a chat based question.