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Welcome to the Friday edition of our newsletter. We spend Fridays going deeper into tools and trends related to generative AI (and Tuesdays sharing news updates).

In last Friday’s edition of our newsletter, we looked at Microsoft Copilot’s recently added agentic capabilities in Word, Excel, and Powerpoint, focusing specifically on how Copilot can create and edit Powerpoint presentations.

This week, we’re taking a similar look at Copilot’s agentic capabilities in Excel. Continue reading to learn how to use Copilot to analyze and modify Excel worksheets.

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To get started with Copilot in Excel, you first need to click on the Copilot logo in the bottom-right corner (it might still be in the upper-right corner if you have not updated Excel).

This opens Copilot in the sidebar, as you can see below.

To unlock Copilot’s agentic features, be sure to select “Allow editing” above the prompt window so that Copilot can take actions on your document.

When “Allow editing” is selected, this allows Copilot to directly edit your spreadsheet. This mode uses Excel's main features, such as tables, charts, and formulas, to help you update budgets, analyze data, or create financial models. And because it uses Excel’s built-in tools, your changes stay editable and you remain in control.

Here’s roughly how it works: After you submit a prompt, Copilot analyzes your task and creates a step-by-step plan. It then works directly in your document to carry out that plan, review the results, and evaluate whether the outcome matches your intent.

Let’s consider a few examples.

First, Copilot in “Allow editing” can now apply any formatting requests you pass along to it. For example, in the example below, when I ask it to highlight the largest value in a given column, it not only highlights the first instance of the max value, but it also asks me if I want every instance of that max value to be highlighted.

By contrast, if we switch the mode from “Allow Editing” to “Chat Only,” Copilot only gives us a suggestion as to how to perform the task without doing it for us.

If we ask Copilot to help visualize our data, even with an open-ended prompt, it’ll respond with some clarifying questions. In the example below, I asked it to help me visualize the contrast between List Price and Actual Price in some sales data, and it gave me five possible ways to make this contrast: by product, by region, by country, an overall summary, or a distribution view.

Once I specify that I want to understand the contrast by region, the following plot is produced in a new sheet:

As a final example, if you ask for Copilot to create a dashboard for you, it’ll put together something fairly comprehensive. Here’s a snippet:

In the resulting dashboard, you can verify the formulas used for any given cell. This allows you to see where the data is coming from and double check any questionable outcomes. For example, I highlighted a specific cell in one of the dashboard tables and the corresponding Excel formula appears in the formula bar.

One additional new mode for Copilot is “Plan” mode, which is a more cautious version of “Allow editing.” In “Plan” mode, when you describe the task you want Copilot to perform in your spreadsheet, Copilot will share with you a plan to carry out that task. Then you can give Copilot the go-ahead to proceed with the plan.

Let’s look at one example. When I ask Copilot to build a pivot table of items sold by region, it first asks for clarifying questions before coming up with a plan.

Once it has all the information it needs, it passes along a plan that requires my approval. After I click “Proceed,” it’s off to the races!

Here’s the final output, which is exactly what I was looking for:

With these newly added agentic capabilities, Copilot can perform a wide range of tasks, including: