1.4 – Copilot in Excel Lesson

Lesson Overview

Using Copilot in Excel can dramatically reduce the time it takes to manage, analyze, and present spreadsheet data. Traditionally, users spent significant effort building formulas, formatting data, and making sense of information through charts and tables. Copilot now brings these capabilities within easy reach by allowing you to request actions in plain language and having Excel handle the complex details behind the scenes.

This lesson walks through the typical workflow for activating Copilot in Excel—covering necessary setup, such as saving files to OneDrive, and converting your data to a compatible table format. By the end, you’ll see how simple it is to automate common Excel tasks: combining columns with formulas, highlighting specific values (like those above a threshold), sorting and filtering lists, and turning raw numbers into charts and summaries.

Anyone using Excel for business reports, educational assessments, account lists, or operations tracking will find Copilot’s tools useful. Whether you’re working with a list of challenge participants, sales logs, or project data, the skills covered here enable faster, more accurate analysis and data presentation.

Who This Is For

If you use Excel for organizing, analyzing, or sharing data, learning to use Copilot will help you work more efficiently and confidently. This lesson is especially relevant for:

• Educators tracking student progress or participation
• Marketers compiling survey results or campaign analytics
• Business professionals managing account lists, sales data, or reporting
• HR team members working with attendance or review records
• Operations teams analyzing usage, inventory, or workflow data
• Anyone new to working with formulas, sorting, or charting in Excel

Where This Fits in a Workflow

Copilot in Excel becomes valuable as soon as you move beyond simple data entry. After gathering your data, it’s common to need to clean it up, generate summaries, or answer specific questions—this is where Copilot shines. Saving your spreadsheet to OneDrive makes all features available: you can then quickly set up new formulas, highlight trends, and produce charts for reports or presentations.

For example, if you’re tracking a group’s progress on a challenge, Copilot can instantly combine columns to make reporting easier, highlight users who meet certain criteria (like spending over 10 minutes), and create visual breakdowns of completion rates. These skills shorten the time between having data and sharing actionable insights with others.

Technical & Workflow Benefits

Without Copilot, adding new formula columns meant learning specific Excel formulas and manually placing them; highlighting required setting up Conditional Formatting; sorting and filtering needed several menu clicks and careful selection. Copilot speeds up all these steps by turning plain-language requests into real Excel actions.

For example, combining a first and last name column takes just a simple Copilot command—instead of figuring out syntax. Highlighting all users above a certain threshold or creating a summary chart is almost instant. For recurring weekly, monthly, or campaign reports, these improvements stack up, giving you more time for deeper analysis or checking data quality. Copilot’s cloud-based operation (via OneDrive) also means your work is saved and accessible anywhere.

Practice Exercise

To reinforce these concepts, open or create a sample spreadsheet—such as a list of participants in an event with columns like “First Name”, “Last Name”, “Completed”, and “Time Spent (minutes)”.

1. Save your file to OneDrive to enable Copilot.
2. Convert your participant data to a table format (select a cell, then choose the convert option).
3. Use Copilot to:
   • Add a column combining first and last names after the second column
   • Highlight all rows where “Time Spent (minutes)” is greater than 10
   • Sort your table so that the most active participants appear at the top
   • Create a chart showing the percentage of participants who completed the event

After completing these steps, ask yourself: How much faster did you complete these tasks compared to doing them manually in Excel?

Course Context Recap

This lesson showed what’s possible with Copilot in Excel, building on your previous setup with OneDrive and auto-save. You’ve learned how to automate and simplify essential data management tasks, making it easier to analyze and present information accurately. Next, you’ll continue exploring ways Copilot can enhance other Microsoft 365 apps and extend these capabilities to your daily workflow. Continue the course to master the full potential of Copilot Pro in Microsoft 365.