Microsoft Copilot in Excel: A 2025 Complete Overview
- Graziano Stefanelli
- May 1
- 3 min read
Why Copilot in Excel Matters
You may be managing a family budget, studying for chemistry, or juggling thousands of sales rows at work... Excel is still the go-to grid for “stuff in rows and columns.”
Copilot adds an AI chat pane to that grid. You type plain-language requests, and Excel answers with summaries, charts, formulas, or even Python code—saving you clicks and helping you see patterns faster.
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1 | Getting Started
What you need | Quick details |
Microsoft 365 with Copilot | Any personal, family, business, or enterprise plan that includes the Copilot add-on. |
OneDrive or SharePoint storage | Keep your workbook in the cloud so Copilot can read and write to it. |
Tidy data | Convert raw ranges into an Excel Table (Ctrl + T) and avoid merged cells. |
Where to open Copilot | Click Copilot on the Home ribbon, or select a cell/table and tap the floating Copilot icon. |
Keyboard shortcut | Press Win + C (Windows 11) to pop open Copilot anywhere, including inside Excel. |
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2 | Everyday Things Copilot Can Do
Common goal | Example prompt | What happens |
Get insights | “Summarize monthly spending and point out any spikes.” | Copilot inserts a short narrative plus an optional line or column chart. |
Write a formula | “Add a column that calculates sales tax at 7 % for column D.” | A correct formula is created, filled down, and explained. |
Build a chart | “Create a pie chart of expenses by category.” | A new sheet appears with the requested visual, linked to your data. |
Highlight data | “Shade rows where grades are below 70.” | Conditional formatting is applied automatically. |
Clean up text | “Split the full-name column into first and last names.” | Copilot adds two new columns with the separated text. |
These tasks work just as well on a grocery list as they do on a million-row transaction table.
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3 | Deeper Analysis with Python (Optional)
Ask Copilot: “Analyze this table with Python.”
A new sheet opens containing auto-generated Python code—often pandas for cleaning and matplotlib for visuals.
Copilot runs the code, pastes the chart or statistical output into the workbook, and describes what it found in everyday language.
When you’re done, choose Stop advanced analysis to close the Python pane.
This is handy for quick regressions, clustering, or prettier plots without leaving Excel.
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4 | What’s New in 2025
Table from a prompt – Describe the table you want (“budget with month, category, amount, and running total”) and Copilot builds it, formulas included.
Sentiment & theme analysis – Point Copilot at a column of comments or reviews and ask for overall mood or common topics.
Phone-image capture – Snap a whiteboard or receipt in the Copilot mobile app; Excel extracts the data directly into a sheet.
Think Deeper plans – Copilot can now propose multi-step approaches (clean → analyze → visualize) and let you accept or tweak the plan before it runs.
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5 | Tips for Best Results
Select before you ask. Highlight a range or table so Copilot knows exactly what to examine.
Keep it tabular. Clear headers, no blank rows, and no merged cells make responses faster and more accurate.
Review everything. Copilot’s formulas and charts are usually right, but always sanity-check numbers that matter.
Be specific. Instead of “make a chart,” try “make a clustered column chart of average temperature by month on Sheet2.”
Stay privacy-aware. Workbooks stay in your Microsoft 365 tenant; nothing is used to train the underlying model.
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6 | Prompt Ideas for Any User
“Create a calendar heat-map of daily steps from this fitness log.”
“Find duplicates in the email column and list them on a new sheet.”
“Using Python, run k-means clustering on columns B–E and label each row with its cluster.”
“Generate a forecast for household electricity usage for the next six months.”
“Turn this raw survey data into a summary table of responses by age group.”
Excel has always been powerful, but Copilot turns that power into a conversation.
