- You can now interact with Excel cells in natural language with = copilot
- It does not interact with external data from the Internet … yet
- You can combine it with other Excel features
Microsoft rolls a new Excel AI feature directly into cells so you can utilize generative AI and exploit even more information even easier than you can look up a simple formula in its spreadsheet software.
Copilot in Excel cells rolled out to Microsoft 365 Copilot Beta users in the Insider program and Beta channel to start with, the tighter AI integration will be available on Windows (version 2509+) and Mac (version 16.101+) before it comes to the web version.
Works as a normal Microsoft Excel feature, users can add prompts in quotes and optional cell areas in even more context, leading to the results automatically changing when the source data changes.
Excel Copilot function
“Just enter a natural language prompt in your spreadsheet, reference cell values as needed, and see Copilot instantly generate AI-run results,” explained partner director Catherine Pidgeon in a blog post.
In addition to using the AI tool to create new types of prompt or generate formulas that they may not have been able to without expert knowledge, users can also combine Excel Copilot formula with other features such as IF, Switch, Lambda or Wraprows.
Some examples of = Copilot’s use cases include summary of customer feedback, categorization of data, integration of external knowledge and formatting.
In its most simple form, a feature may look like “= copilot (prompt_part1, [context1]) ” – Although context is optional.
Pidgeon noted that the = Copilot feature only uses data it was trained on, so it cannot access new data from the Internet or the company documents at this time.
As a beta product, there are still some improvements that Microsoft hopes to make to its Excel AI assistant, including several data sources in addition to LLM training and activation of date formatting per year. Excel’s Date-Serial Format Rather than only text as is currently the case.
