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Copilot in Excel

Copilot in Excel is Microsoft's AI assistant inside Excel: you ask for an analysis in your own words, and it builds formulas, PivotTables, charts or summaries in your workbook.

Select any words here to ask your Maestro about them.

You ask Copilot to add a margin column for your products. The mug costs $18 and sells for $30, and the column says 67%. What happened?

A sheet with the price and cost of five products from an online store. Example data.

What it does: you ask in your own words for what you want, and Copilot does it in the workbook: it writes formulas, adds columns, builds PivotTables and charts, and summarizes what it finds.

What it needs: a Microsoft 365 plan that includes Copilot in Excel (a work or school plan, Microsoft 365 Premium, or Personal and Family with AI credits) and data with clear headers.

Where it breaks: a formula that looks right can calculate something else, and a confident answer can come from the wrong data. Check every number against the sheet. Alternatives include Claude for Excel, and Power Query for cleaning up before you ask.

How it's used

One request, start to finish

Revenue by month with Copilot

  1. Format your data as a table with clear headers (Insert > Table)Copilot reads a table best when each column is named for what it holds.
  2. marked: Open Copilot (its icon is at the lower right) and ask: "Add a chart of revenue by month"Name the columns the way the table names them.
  3. Copilot builds a PivotTable and a chart in the workbookIt edits the file directly; every change can be undone.
  4. Check its total against your sheet's before you share it
Copilot does the steps in Excel itself, so everything it makes is a PivotTable, a formula or a chart you can open and check.

When to look closer

It changes your data, not a copy

You ask: "Clean up the region names"

  1. marked: The Region column says "Northeast", "NE" and "N. East"

You ask Copilot to clean up the region names in your sales sheet. What happens to the original names?

Ask your Maestro about Copilot in Excel

It answers from the free course page closest to this word, the way it answers while you study.

Example

You: What does "Copilot in Excel" mean, in plain words?

Your Maestro: I'll explain it with a case of yours: it sticks better than a definition. Which monthly Excel analysis would you like to ask for in your own words?

Asking about: Answers from the page "Can Claude Code work with my Excel files?"

Only this browser keeps what you ask here. How it works

Learn more

Related terms

  • Claude for Excel

    Claude for Excel is Anthropic's add-in that puts Claude inside Excel: it reads your workbook, answers with citations to the cells, writes formulas and makes changes in the same file.

  • Pivot table

    A pivot table summarizes a long table in seconds: it groups by the columns you pick and sums, counts or averages another, with no formulas.

  • Power Query

    Power Query is the tool in Excel and Power BI for bringing in data and cleaning it with steps that get saved: dropping columns, changing types, filtering rows. When the new file arrives, you click Refresh and every step runs again on its own.

  • XLOOKUP

    XLOOKUP looks for a value in one column and returns the data from the same row in another column, to the right or the left: =XLOOKUP(E2,B2:B9,C2:C9).

The whole glossary